I hope the money doesn’t get soaked.

Winter has slid off the mountains and into our valley. Snow falls in mean pellets. Slush rides up pant-legs, soaking the calves. Shoppers move along at a crabbish gait, picking their steps carefully over the ice-slicks.

At the lake, the water is chalk-green from the silt washed down from the Jura’s limestone slopes.

Mysteriously, the swans have lined up alongside the shore,  parked horizontally in rough waves only a few feet from the sharp rocks and cement bulwark, paddling madly to keep themselves from smashing aground.

Seagulls hang suspended in the air by a walking bridge, dropping down to try for the snug spots beneath, but the mallards will not allow them in.

And in the midst of all this froth, I walked to our Swiss bank with a fistful of cash, more than I think I’ve carried down a public road before. I feel like I’m in Mission Impossible, surrounded by suave German and French-speaking clients, striding across marble floors, hoping that the teller does not ask where I got all this money.

Changing money doesn’t have any real tension to it, but we’re in a foreign country where we don’t have a clue what the laws are regarding moving money around – and there are rules. We  have only the vaguest recollection of them, however, so I dive into the bank and take my chances that I won’t be arrested for some monetary misdemeanor.

Of course, no one raises a brow. This is Switzerland. They think nothing of changing large Swiss bills into a stuffed envelope full of U.S. cash.

What fun. And that’s all there is for today.