Sleet, Snow, or Shine

1 April 10, Boise

Yesterday got away for a morning ski up at Bogus Basin. Ten inches of powder, much untouched in the trees. Snowy Ponderosa pines and flanges of granite leaning against a pale blue sky. Towering cumulous above the loping mountains to the north, and to the south, the Owyhees white and chiseled above the tawny plain. Except for my legs going watery after a dozen dips, requiring me to rest and take in the view before starting off again, the tele turns felt good and the body knew just what to do. All that powder didn’t hurt, either.

It’s been ten days now since Obama signed the Health Care Reform Bill into law, and while I’m glad the thing went through, am feeling some regrets about it. Why couldn’t we get a public option in the mix? When Democrats knew they were going to use budget reconciliation to push the bill through on a straight majority vote, they could have thrown in the House’s public option and still rallied the fifty-one votes necessary for Senate passage. That’s what the GOP would’ve done. Those fuckers aren’t afraid to ramp up their legislation to ideological heights when they see an opening. But democrats? They won’t play hardball if they’re afraid of losing a few seats in the coming fall election. But when will another opportunity like this come again? Another two or three or ten decades before both houses and the executive branch are under dem control? This was our chance, and we played it center and safe. Well, how safe is the future of our health care now? Not much safer than it was before, as the same gatekeepers are at the gate, albeit tempered by a few more restrictions on their behavior. We need not only new keepers, but new gates: public option gates. All this talk about consumer freedom is ridiculous. Real freedom would be an option to get out of the capitalistic, pro-profit route and have a healthy, fair, decent way of getting not health coverage, but health care for all of our people. You know the right is shaping the argument when a basic ideal such as that has you sounding like a radical.

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Sleet and snow all morning, coming down in white clumps that gloss the streets. The bare trees etch a somber thicket against the grey sky. Shades of brown and grey and winter greens, against which the first colors of spring stand out delicately: budding leaves lacing the elm trees along the center of the street; forsythia in yellow bursts from the sodden yards; thumb-thick pale green buds opening in the lilacs; daffodils as brightly ridiculous as plastic flowers stuck in the ground.

So we’ve found a house to rent, and we’re not sure the April Fool’s joke isn’t on us. After all the slap-together rentals we’ve seen, this one is a jewel, perhaps a stolen jewel for the mere 900 per month in rent. The catch is that the place is still on the market as a short sale, and we’ll have to move out on thirty days notice should the house sell or go into foreclosure. But that’s a roll of the dice we’re willing to take at this point, a gamble that compliments our need to be free of a lease in case we find a house to buy. Our fear, though, is that after growing accustomed to the fine surroundings here we’ll get booted out and have to settle for one of the lesser rentals we’ve seen about the neighborhood.

From what I can guess, the house was built around 1910, as it lacks the gables and angles and frills of a Queen Ann, yet isn’t as fine-lined as a craftsman. All the rooms get great light, and the living and dining room windows look out onto the stately, tree-lined street of Harrison Blvd. You look down the wide street through a canopy of huge oaks and maples that lean out from spacious yards and islands where lamp posts stand like sentinels from the Victorian age. At night, the lampposts glow among the long interwoven limbs of the bare trees, and you can imagine the shadows of horse carriages slipping past, clippity-clopping their way down the long boulevard, carrying riders homeward or into town for opera shows and dinners in gilded restaurants or perhaps a covert rendezvous in the secret tunnels below the capital building.