It's three A.M. here on the high desert. Why I'm up at this hour of the morning, I cannot say for sure. But I'm liking it. A developing snow storm is making it a cozy experience. The wind has been coming in gusts, tinkling the chimes out back on the patio. Out my dining room window, I can see the white and yellow street lights of Salt Lake City stretching south like ornaments strung along the broad valley floor. Like stars, they twinkle, especially when viewed through bare tree branches quaking in the wind. The mountains surrounding the city are veiled by lowering clouds. Snow lifts in spindrifts from the roof of my neighbor's home and others on the slope between the city and the foothills. What is it about storms that I find so calming? I'm reminded of a scene many years ago by now of homes dug snugly into the mountain as I traveled by train from Brig, Switzerland, upward to Zermatt, the village below the Matterhorn. I daydream of those homes sometimes. They are remote and isolated despite the presence of a rail line cutting through the wild. I think how nice it would be to lay in a winter's supply of food and goods and spend the months reading, never leaving til spring. (Well, maybe occasionally, to travel back down to Brig, where the Sherlock Holmes Bar fairly rocks on Saturday night.) I remember an article, read decades ago, recommending that parents teach their children to "love the storm," actually and metaphorically. In his classic book, "The Denial of Death," Ernest Becker quotes someone saying that to enjoy and to weather life, we must learn to "stand naked in the storm." It reminds me of what a fellow psychotherapist likes to say; that is, we help our clients learn to thrive amidst the "rough and tumble" of life. As a child growing up in eastern Pennsylvania, I savored thunder storms in the summer, especially at night. They brought cool relief to those of us who suffered in heat and humidity, without air conditioning. And they provided theatre. In the night, the lightning would flash and depict a scarred and relatively impoverished neighborhood in a more attractive light, a lower, working-class neighborhood scrubbed of its many blights, seen only in limited black-and-white detail as would be provided by a film negative. In the day, a stream called "Poor House Run" would fill and overflow its banks, and damned if I didn't think that exciting. We would build popsicle rafts and float them down street gutters rushing with water. And the lush green Pennsylvania countryside would glow with a freshly waxed finish. This morning, the forecast for the Salt Lake Valley is for one to two inches of snow, but here on the "bench" (between the foothills and the valley) we are likely to get more. It might not sound like much, but we have had consistent waves of storms for the past two months. Some people are sick of it, complaining of it as Southern Californians complain of the Santa Ana winds that have been known to drive people mad. The wind is growing stronger now, the storm closer to breaking. My back storm door is unlatched and creaking. The chimes are tinkling. I can hear the water tumbling down the falls of my Koi pond. I can feel the temperature dropping in my inadequately insulated dining room as I sit at the table typing. I really don't want to go back to bed. This is just too good.