The snow

The snow fell as snow tends too this time of year. I'd describe it, but you know what I mean. Time moves slower when it snows, and everyone knows this. It's related to our ability to perceive, in this sort of snow, each individual flake as it glides from heaven to earth. This sudden perception that the reality that we are swimming through is beautiful, and tangible, wakes us up to ourselves. We stop whatever we are doing, milling flour, fixing cars, idling away at computers, to stand at the window and peer outward rather than inward for a change. In this way the snow acts as a perfect circle, first leading us from our own minor worries and into the world, and then back in again, but this time with the understanding that our lives are something more than we'd thought before the first flake fell.

We remember the clipping of heels on old stone streets, water lying in the low places between cobbles, how the rhythm made us stop and peer up into cold blue skies. We remembered the pale yellow street lamps dropping their spotlights on the slender, freckled arms of women we'd forgotten, the complex smell our fathers pipe tobaccos, delphiniums and light vinegar; we remembered them standing below our cold bedroom windows, less like men than shapes of darkness at the end of orange fuses. They were good men.

And when we got home, slower now, because of the snow, we hugged our wives and husbands, our children and dogs. We curled up with them on the couch trying to keep ourselves warm. And even this brief tenderness does not inoculate us from the morning, when our nostalgia has been wiped clean. In the morning we hunch over our car wheels, hands cold, and wonder what quicksilver dreams, what strands of hair, we'd once held that were now lost in a sea of red lights.