November 26, 2019
I love this kind of snow, ten inches of it, when the city’s hushed and few cars pass my house; when we got groceries yesterday and I sit next to fireplace radiance with my laptop; when kids are already tucked into their homes on Thanksgiving break; when our power doesn’t go out and our furnace keeps working and we are grateful. Such a storm comes every third year, and I wonder what to bake, because with snow like this, one must bake something. Inventorying the pantry, I ask Phil, oatmeal cookies or brownies? “Brownies?!” he queries, and I have my decision. I thaw out lentil soup I made awhile back for lunch, plan curry for dinner. Early this morning Christine shoveled her walk and half of ours before going to work. (Hospitals don’t close.) Midmorning Jenn and a new young neighbor I haven’t met shoveled the rest. Thirty years ago I was the young neighbor shoveling my elderly neighbors’ walks. That makes me wistful, but also thankful. After lunch I sweep away the last inch, take photos, come in when my toes and fingers go numb. I do no work, although there’s plenty on the desktop: revising my January classes, translation projects, the next blog post. But today I scroll through Facebook for the sixth time, tire of snow photos, sign off. Today I sit by the fireplace, listen to the silence and read. I love this snow.
November 26, 2019
December 4, 2019
The soiled remnants of this storm leave sooty lumps and ridges hard as rocks on neighborhood streets, the once-smooth white sheets on lawns now speckled with brown leaves, crisscrossed with footprints. The world is dingy. Finally a warmish day and I take a walk, but nearly every block has an uncleared section, snow compressed into icy cobbles by all who have walked on it, and I proceed gingerly, mindful of my fragile bones. No falling, I caution myself as I go. No falling. I soon give up, come home, play solitaire instead, my will to work sapped. Nine days of snow on the ground, rare in Denver. Here, snow comes today and evaporates tomorrow, in a blaze of sunshine. This is no longer a happy hermitage: I pace the rooms restlessly. Yet going out is so much trouble—the lumpy streets, the cold. An email reject arrives from a journal I was sure would be a good match and I haven’t submitted anything in months. The deadline tasks before me are distasteful. I’ve gained weight and ought to stop eating, should slug through this mess and go to the gym, should at least take a shower. Buddhists say we must understand that this life is never satisfactory. Yeah, yeah. I look at the baleful beasts on deadline, hate them, play another game of solitaire.
Your writing prompt, should you choose to accept it: Bright side, dark side, or half & half? Where are you today? Post responses as comments on the blog.
My dermatologist tells me the intense pulsed light treatment will “brighten things up” before the holidays. I want some brown spots I earned playing on bikes under layers of spf to be gone. I point her to the tiny blip, the thick skin bump on the side of my nose. She touched it briefly, states uncategorically: “Biopsy it.” I basked on timeless beaches and lounged beside shimmering swimming pools until hearing, with sorrow, at 18, that even joyous sunlight could lead to bad things.
Jenny-Lynn, years ago, as I had the squamous cell lumps removed from my back, I remembered how I worked on my tan every summer in my teens and twenties. We always seem to have so much to learn.
Nice post, Pat! That storm was all things wonderful to epic icy inconvenience. Grateful for this thaw.
We must have been thinking the same kind of thoughts at the same time:
The Sun, the Golden One
Some of those losses were through the mundanity
of mortality, and those we know; expect, accept,
the way of it; the weather of living from spring to
snow, somewhat predictable, all as it will in time.
Plans go on: the thats and the thises, the ongoing
drum roll of days that in spite of it all, make us
march on, step it up, keep us keeping on along
down the path of practicality, plodding. And then
sometimes that out of the blue something comes
at you, lead-pipe, car-crash, ice-slip, stair-fall
betrayal of all you thought you knew, fractures
the seconds into shards of disbelief and sorrow,
re-proposes what you used to know, the familiar
cloaked now in mounds of an unexpected snow,
gray under a glowering sky; the sun, the golden
one, gone cold behind towering cumulonimbus
clouds hinting at yet more dread and darkness
ahead? We don’t know. Time, who doesn’t tell,
withholds the Future until it becomes a Now.
Until then, we wait, we burrow, we bet our life.
Bravo, David Perkins! Driving last line: we wait, we borrow, we bet our life. Love it. And yes, another variation on a time-honored theme.