this_winter_is_somewhere_else ever dumbening It's November. But it's January. It's Berkeley. But it's StLouis. Scents, smokey and spiced, keep tipping in and out, drifting me back to Beijing. The sky is part Missouri, part Bayern. The trees and bracing air leave me tracing threads back through time and back again to where I sit and stand and walk right here, breathing, aware. Soften. So often. And exhale towards the sun standing still. The candy-sweet berries of the Nouveau touch my tongue and have my eyes looking yet again through the tall plate-glass windows, between the white columns, out onto St. Charles Avenue. Meanwhile the rusty steel of garden sculpture plays as twigs snapping brown under my yellow boyhood boots. The greys need no assistance. But the Trumpetvine, the Bird of Paradise, the too-green xiao dou miao—they conspire, without pretention, to remind me exactly where I am. 031120 what's it to you? who go blather from