w i n t e r
every body echoes
Six tarnished brass gears of various sizes turn. Each slightly faster than the other. Two controlling the hands. One holding the weight. The other distributing the time as it should be, regulating it and pacing it, spreading it through the oak and metal, down the thin spring attached to the pendulum. One small hammer clicks. I can hear it now two rooms away as I watch the snow fall outside through wide blinds and twelve panes of glass.
It started again around 11:30. Long past my drive home down Highway 54. Tonight I took the back roads. I wanted to see the low clouds reflected off the snow. I wanted to see the long fields covered in white and the tree lines, a dull mottled dark green and black in the night.
I wanted to drive by perfect little houses illuminated by small fires seen through a front window. I wanted to see the rails of fences and derelict cars, all made more intense and alone in the light bounced off the snow. Brighter than any moon, this was the night I wanted the back roads.
See, it's been awhile since I've seen snow. Some of you probably see it everyday, so you'll have to excuse me. Some of you may have never seen it at all, you'll have to excuse me too. But there will be a few of you who maybe once every couple of years wake up one morning and everything is thrown. Where there was grass and branches and thin pine needles and bushes and cars and houses and every imaginable texture, there is nothing but soft white powder.
If you're lucky (and I was) the snow isn't sticky and wet, but almost dry to the touch, amplifying all noise and making things deathly quiet at the same time. That's when you know you have to hit the back roads.
By the end of the day the snow formed around objects, the sun came out and it melted snow in places. Some texture came back into the world. Enough that objects began to stand out.
A white clapboard church in the dark. A crow. A tricycle left in someone's lawn. A boat. All these objects are kept apart from each other and their normal relation to the world by the snow. It's as if they were underexposed onto a piece of photographic paper. Or stenciled there. Or simply agitated into being in the tray of D-76. But I never get enough time to make it to the stop bath, and forget about the fixer. The car is moving too fast and the images are not mine to keep, just flashes outside a window fogged by heat and speckled with crystals of salt from the road.
Once home I crunched through the snow and looked around my yard. I walked down the block. I listened to the creek I couldn't see. I had dinner. I read. I passed the time with a couple CD's, but I couldn't keep from thinking that in a few hours I would grow tired and fall asleep and it would all be gone in the morning. And then in a couples days it would be as if there had never been any snow at all. It might even warm up again. A week from now I could be driving with the top down again, just like last weekend.
But that was before I went upstairs to try and find a book. Before I came back down an hour or so later, having been side tracked by an old journal. Before I reached for the light switch in the living room and noticed the steady passage of snow in the halo of light by the front door window. Before I crawled onto the couch and stared outside trying to see the other side of the street but having no luck about it.
And just before I shut out the light in my room and opened the blinds. The shadows are long both inside and outside the house. The front lawn has an erie glow from the house lights. I notice the mahogany dresser is cold to the touch as I slide a coin into my fingers and begin to turn it over and over, paying it no more mind than a stray dog, instead fixated on the precipitation outside.
That's when I notice it.
Six tarnished brass gears of various sizes. All turning together. All daring me to listen. All telling me at their own speed that this moment, and every other, belongs to them. That the teeth on their gears control the longevity of the events outside, nothing else.
And I am welcome.
I am thankful.
And on nights like tonight I can participate with my chair and my coin, so long as I am quiet.
goodnight 1.20.00