An Impossible Thing
Among the many glamorous mysteries — those things that itch at your brain — that wake me with a jolt, this week’s was a wild “whoomph” at 5am before the sun had broken over the edge of the mountains — when the world was still cool and gray and bedroom objects came slowly into focus as they escaped the night.
Even with earplugs and the white noise of a small fan stacked atop the bookshelf, the “whoomph” pulled me straight from a dream in which I imagined myself haunted by some silly spirit who was attempting to derail my days, spraying me down with the hose on my way out the front door. I rarely have the sorts of dreams that lead to illumination. Lately it’s been all neural misfires and feet that forget how to run. Meaningless, in other words. Fluff.
It took several bleary seconds before I placed where I was, pulled the earplugs out of my ears, and lay there squinting at the dim room, determining whether or not I’d dreamt the “whoomph.” A few moments later, a sound like liquid concrete slopping from a great height hit the roof.
“It’s the racoons,” J said, jumping out of bed and shuffling toward the front door. All summer and fall we’d battled their tiny, mischievous minds as they found new ways to loudly topple the trash cans at the darkest hours of the night and smear stinking garbage across the front walkway. The cascade of slops did sound a lot like footsteps running over the roof. But J came back to the bed with a shrug.
“Garbage cans are fine,” he said. “And we got a ton of snow last night.”
I lifted the blind to see the backyard filled with a foot or more of the heaviest, densest snow Boulder had received all year. This, just five days before the first day of spring. Colorado weather stations had warned the Front Range for a week or more about the massive snowstorm headed our way. But the night before, it was pissing rain and 45 degrees and I didn’t know if I believed it — which perhaps is why so many others found themselves trapped on I-70 in blizzard conditions.
I lay there, warm and perfectly still beneath the down comforter, listening to the clumps of snow slap against the shingles as they tumbled from the trees, already forgetting the haunted dream. I drifted in and out of sleep for the next few hours, wondering if I’d wake to a tree branch stabbed through the ceiling, finally rising a minute before 9am to open the glaring screen of my work laptop, right on time.
Outside, the snow fell like fine rain, filling the depressions of footprints before the next step could be taken. The scrape of plastic shovels on concrete outsung the chickadees while the blue flashing lights of the snowplows danced across the white walls all day.
I had no sense of urgency. The power was on. J was shoveling the driveway. I was answering work emails. One email alerted me that insurance companies who swore to stop funding Arctic drilling projects had pulled out of their promises. Another that global ocean heat records were smashed day after day after day through 2023. I watched the snow gather like bushels of tiny white berries from the home office window, piling together in heaps and mounds, smoothing the rough edges and crisp right angles of the world. I stared at the snow while the email notifications pinged into the otherwise silent room.
This could easily become a story about climate change (and it is) or a story about how Colorado needed the snow (and it did), but for once in my life I want it to be less than that. Or is it more? I want that briefly glamorous mystery that anything could mean nothing at all. That snow could fall in a drought-stricken town and for one glimmering moment that’s all it is — a gorgeous chaotic blanket laid over the people, settling them to a twinkle of stillness. An inhale held just a millisecond longer creating the tiniest window for wonder. An exhale that slows the heart just enough to invite contemplation.
Today, for a moment, the snow is a prayer, or a small white bird resting on a powerline drooping under the thick weight of snow, any moment poised to take flight.
