So KJB came to get me, we went looking for a sweater for my dress -- and failed, go figure -- then just as we were getting back to my house, the storm began in earnest. I was certain the threats of network news weathermen were overblown and fourteen inches smacked of hyperbole to mine ears. Hey, you've met my dad, haven't you? KING of hyperbolic exclamations. I love him.
And it is still snowing now. Through the night, through the day. It's been over twenty-four long hours now and we've shoveled more snow that I ever expected to shovel in such a short period of time. We also took a moment to play in the snow. Oh! We rode on the ski-doos, with Bush and Preston. They even let us drive them around the block, which was terrifying and exciting, and wonderful, and breathtaking all at once. Made snow angels, pressed our faces into the mounded snow on the porch railings, observed the eye of the storm ("I can see stars. Do you think it's over?") threw snowballs at Zevon, carved the deathly Hallows into the fluff on her windshield. Then we went inside and drank cocoa, watched Ordinary People -- which, coincidentally, Robert Redford directed but is not in -- and decorated cookies. My favorites are the gruesome ones. Decapitated Rudolph, the armless ginger, the headless ginger.
Question: is a ginger still a ginger if his head gets eaten?
It was lovely. It's that kind of night that I'll miss when I'm in Scotland, but I'm sure I'll have entirely different awesome times. (Dad just came home and thought I had a friend over. "Whose jacket is that?" he asked. "The leopard skin one," he says. Haha.) So now I'm sitting with a mug of hot chocolate made the special way, listening to Catie Curtis, cuddled up in a blanket eating an eggplant pizza from Mike's, with my antler headband on. (Anyone who has worked the Jayce with me on Christmas Eve knows the headband all too well. I think it's why Stephanie and I became friends in the first place.) And I'm happy, warm, comfy, and so content. It's lovely.
So I've decided that I'm probs an Eskimo. All my best writing has been about snow. And I love snow.
From an email dated Monday, January 14, 2008:
"Half-melted candles are burning in enormous hurricanes on the windowsills. The curved glass doubles and elongates the flame, which flirts shamelessly with its own reflection like a middle school girl before a dance or her best friend's bar mitzvah and I sit entranced. Any moment now the heavens will open and the storm will begin. I cannot wait. I think of you more often than I care to admit.
If I could will the snow to fall, I doubt it would ever end.
I should go to bed; the snow will not begin until I'm asleep. Sweet dreams."
From an email dated Wednesday, February 13, 2008:
"It started snowing while I cooked dinner and half an hour later, as we walked toward the 'erotic poetry reading' (mostly bad attempts at performance art and girls in corsets or thigh highs making those present uncomfortable by proclaiming their as-yet unknown desire for a one-night stand with the evening's organizer... he responded, I suppose, as gracefully as could be hoped, but she still left the room after he read his poem, which decidedly did not ask her for the same) the snow lay half an inch deep. Light stuff, drifting but not relucant, still and flat but glittering like the remnants of a tacky Christmas card. I danced as we trudged across campus in the purple-golden glow -- royalty never knew such colors! -- and knocked my knees together in the sheer exuberance of the moment. If someone had given me a shovel and a pair of boots, I could happily have cleared the walkways of the three inches that fell while we listened to bad poetry and platonic crushes on gay boys met their ends all thanks to a sweater vest, a large triangle of orange chest hair, costume jewelry, and the impression that he had been drunk and unshowered since I last saw him in November. The snow continues to fall, a perfect chemistry of water and cold, the sort of snow that skiers dream about cutting into first.
By the time I wake up, it is scheduled to have turned to freezing rain, the process begun before I even lay my head beside my pillow tonight. There will be no snow day. I will work my way from class to class through a storm of wet with no redemption but the knowledge that last night, for a moment, the snow was perfect. I cannot regret the rain that ruins my schoolbooks and climbs the leg of my jeans, even as it whisks the soft and still snow away from all but memory. Without this rain, there would have been no snow and I'm learning, slowly, but my god I am learning.
'You pray for rain, but you don't want it from a storm.' -A. Cohen.
I am trying to appreciate things for what they are and not mourn the things that are not or that have ceased to be, and to not anticipate things that make come to pass. Nothing in life is a promise but that we die. In the meantime, it will snow and rain and the sun will cut slices into the wind that wreaks havoc on uncovered skin -- a nose, a pair of forsaken ears, perhaps -- of this alone I am certain.
I am going to work now. I will sit pressed against the window, watching the last of the snow fall with the glass frozen against my forehead and my feet resting on the radiator. I'm not asking for anything from the snow. It is enough for me that it exists for a moment. What right have I to ask it to remain?
Sweet dreams."
So, yeah. Total Eskimo. Then again, that might not have been entirely about snow. Context is unimportant when the sky is that heavy color of a bruise just about to turn. I never understood why people say snow is silent. It always seems to whisper as it falls, sweet secrets, sweet nothings, pure unadultered sweetness as it drifts and meanders.
Anyway, some pictures from last night?
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