You know, I say I hate winter, but on nights like these --- cold but clear and not too windy, when I hike up Devon until it dead-ends into a private street at the top of a hill, and look through the leafless trees to find a fantastic view of, I imagine, a good chunk of northeast pittsburgh, and climb around the wooded side of the hill south of Fifth Ave, and slip and fall on my ass in the snow and laugh a couple times, and grab for trunks to steady myself, and find new paths and little stone stairways between houses, and hop down an embankment and find myself in the back of an apartment's parking lot with a richer sense of the local geography, the way a kid knows the woods behind his house --- I secretly don't mind it too much.