I guess I could quit while I’m ahead with the political posts, but whatev.  I mean a maniacal orange crayon has been president now for 10 days and has already set our democracy back approximately 200 years.

I wrote about in the previous post about my experiences as a teenager growing up in the New York suburbs so its all out on the table now.  Here I’m going to get a bit more philosophical but I promise it will tie back to the photos eventually.

During this entire crazy uproar over the Muslim ban, everyone, including me has been sharing plenty of things on Facebook about immigrants of every shape and size.  I feel this particularly because I am an immigrant myself.

One clip in particular though crystalizes very well exactly how I feel.  Its a little clip of former New York governor Mario Cuomo describing his mother, Immacolata Giordano Cuomo, arriving through Ellis Island.  She came from Tremonti in the south of Italy to New Jersey to join her husband who digs il fosso, trenches, ditches.  The one thing Mrs. Cuomo wanted was to see one of her sons sworn in as governor of New York.  The clip is part of a Ken Burns documentary on the meaning of freedom and its relation to the Statue of Liberty.  The clip shows so well not just an immigrants story but the love of a son to a mother.

I don’t have an Ellis Island story but I am struck a lot of the time about how forces in our control and out of our control land us in different places.  I was born in Poland, came to Chicago with my parents as a very young age, moved to New York and then about a million other places and landed in Boston seven years ago.  Boston for all intents and purposes is my home now, but I go to Vermont of course during ski season.

Somehow every time I go to Vermont, it crosses my mind exactly how did I get there and moreover, how lucky I am to actually get to go there, how privileged I am.  Sure I forget this when the alarm goes off at 3:45am to let me know that it is a ski day, but I do ponder on those mountains how lucky I am to get to go there.  Its too bad my beloved grandmothers never got to see how beautiful Vermont is in the winter.

This past weekend I was in Stowe, which for natural beauty is unbeatable.  I was on Spruce Peak late in the day when there was a snow storm.  The snow was beating down and it struck the white that was already on the ground.  With the light, there it just sparkled.  It was breathtaking.

Some pictures from the day: