Do You Get a Snow Day?
The predictions varied vastly, but by Thursday afternoon we were convinced we’d be lucky to get a couple inches of snowy loveliness. So we weren’t so worried about the hundred oak branches hovering over our cars, our lack of snow shovel, or the charming steepness of our driveway. Even at 10pm with three inches of snow, it was nothing but delight to scamper around the neighborhood, chucking snow at giggling neighbors and marveling at how bright everything was, photos easily snapped in the light from neighbors and campus reflected off the ground, off the pale low sky, off the falling and falling flakes.
At 11pm and snow still falling fast, we began to notice other things: the disappearance of electricity; the deep unfamiliar hush, even indoors, under five inches of fresh, wet snow; and how the bays on the other side of a 10-foot fence leaned toward our house, bending deeper and deeper until their tips touched the ground and their white-clad flanks pressed against our living room windows like a giant beast settling against the house to rest. From the loft window the world still glowed palely from the lights of campus and generator-sustained homes, so we had visual as well as audio as trees maxed out under the weight and fulfilled the predicted “thunder,” limbs and whole trees cracking through the air and thudding against the ground all up and down our hillside. We later learned that the one at 3pm was a gray pine landing on our neighbor’s back deck. Lilly heard it and launched herself into her 7-year-old son’s bedroom. “Why didn’t you drag him out of there?” Melanie asks. “There wasn’t time!” Lily shouts. “All I could do was throw my body on top of him. ‘WHAT are you doing?’ he says. ‘Be quiet, there’s a tree falling!’ I say. ‘Oh,’ he says, and goes back to sleep.” No more sleep for Lilly, though, nor for Melanie in the other side of the condo.
Friday we hunker down, surprised that the house only got down to 54 degrees and rallying to move one car forward eight feet and another back as much, for better placement under tenuous limbs. Brief communications as needed, a trek around town to cool Jute’s feet, tend Lorie’s cats, and procure unnecessary groceries, and a long nap carry us through to the return of electricity, which we learn later is a tiny pocket of good luck rather than representative of Angwin.
But Saturday we (by which I mean Barry almost entirely) use the poop shovel and a wide piece of wood to tackle the top of the driveway, which is helpfully more sodden than frozen. I join a crowd of people making better and worse vehicular decisions at the Angwin airport parking lot and set out: Snowshoeing in Angwin!! It may not be environmentally healthy weather, but boy howdy joe, it sure does make me happy to trek behind the Window Tree field and around up to the observatory, patches of blue-sky-sun illuminating far navy-and-white hills and near swaths of undisturbed white.
Reflected Redemption
A funky trajectory into the land of 2023 leaves me perplexed, strangely wobbling between delight and partypooping. But one delight that stays with me is the lilt of silken water under a yellow hull.
Possessed of a sudden urge to get out on the water, I waded through the cluttered baggage of an “on-call” workday to load up and set forth. Barely had the tires hit the tarmac, though, before a jubilant mixed sky of winter turned flat gray, dropped ten degrees, and announced, “GLOOM TO ALL WHO PASS HERE!”
“I shouldn’t have come,” I said out loud. I couldn’t bear to turn back, but the further I drove the gloomier the world — and I — became. In a terrible funk, I carried on, awkwardly lugging the boat down the rocky drought-lengthened hill to the water, getting my shoes muddy and wet while ungracefully plopping into the seat, and gazing forlornly at gray water.
And then. And then spontaneous redemption arrived without fanfare: Clouds split, gray scuttled back into cool depths of newly delineated shadows, thermometers rose.
A world lit in alternatingly crisp and ethereal winter blue and white and copper and kelly green surrounded me on all sides, and beneath, it rocked me gently in my goldenrod cradle.
Ordinary: 6 cu ft Wheelbarrow
Adrift in a tangle of taut muscles and hormones and hubby’s absence for Soul Searching, I let the tiny curving waffle of the chair arms hold up my hands, which I will to rest, utterly, to release the strings trying to pull my temples into the rest of my body…
… and I think of what it would mean to be cradled in a hot springs pool, beneath stars.
I can candle up the bathroom, I think. I can de-clutter the living room and add stuff to the bathwater.
But the little town down the hill fails to provide bentonite clay (only an angry driver laying on the horn while I Share the Road), and I look assessingly at the bathroom ceiling, and think how utterly it will fail to have stars.
I can’t help myself; I begin casting around my earthly possessions for something in which to set some portion of my corporeal self in a pocket of hot water, epsom salts, baking soda. The galvanized tub would hold my feet and ankles. I could sit in the dog crate in 2 inches of water. There’s no way I could fill the inside of the kayak. (Yes, by all means, please laugh!)
But this… this black poly wheelbarrow, with its ACE lettering still moderately white and no cracks in its kindly sloping sides… Why, this can have its bolt hollows scrubbed with a brush, its stout noseguard placed upon a cinderblock. This can be entered carefully by a midsized human with the gentling assistance of a short stool, be poised for a comfortable view of a massive moon climbing leaf by leaf through bay limbs and illuminating soaring arches of oak –
In the dark of a warm October night, assisted by a portable firepit, a bathtub spigot, and a garden hose,
I find myself cradled in a hot pool, beneath stars.
The wondering body and wandering mind relinquish all clocks, and most voices. In this island, I am ringed with song: grocery store’s hum and progressing vehicles murmur and lift, small waves rising from ocean’s chorus. Above them, singing bugs make planetary rings of their vibrations. Overhead, negative space comes and goes —
is this the sky beside me,
cut with bay-leaf absences into outer space?
do I wake or sleep, can something beneath my skin
remember the womb, carried
but untouched by language, and when
I crawl out to gather the pot from the coals,
is it me who pours blackness into blackness
or is it pouring me, ripples that catch shards of moon
scattered all night long without loss, each leaf, each window, each tip
of marshmallow roaster
is a star.
the surface of the lake has disappeared
the center is silent peace and fear, fear and peace:
stars above, stars below.
Grinning Owl 