That’s just about what it’s been, almost 24 hours of tiny flakes steadily coming down.
No wind this time, not like the other day — I lose track of these things, or is it that I never keep it? — there was snow, and then blue sky with ferocious winds, and then more snow, off and on. This stuff started last night sometime, and the sky was whited out all day. Tiny flakes, always the little ones, falling straight down, not so thick as to make it hard to see, but constant, raining down in quiet inexhaustible supply.
And it’s quiet, all right. An adobe house is quiet inside anyway — you wouldn’t believe how much sound is blocked out — but cover the landscape with a blanket of powder snow, and it gets spooky still in here. This is the essence of winter, although that’s not for a few days yet. Winter is the end, the dying, the cold of the cosmos. I can feel it now, in fact, or maybe I just need to put more wood in the stove. I don’t know how much snow there is outside. Probably less than a foot overall so far, as if it matters. All I know is, there’s enough! In his generosity, however, the Great Spirit may double it overnight.
Living in a semi-arid region, the precipitation one does see is especially significant. Most of the yearly measure of it falls here as snow. Like now, like it’s been doing all day long and into the night. Last year I think we got 90 percent of year’s water in late February and early March, when the snow melted all at once. That’s what I think of , when I see all the white stuff: sooner or later, it’s going to melt, God help us. The wrong attitude, I know.
Twenty-four hours of snow and counting… This puts me in mind of visiting places that will be uninhabitable six months from now. That’s how I’d like to live my life, so why don’t I? — not as a mindless migrating beast, just a more mobile one. We could drive down to southern Arizona and see hummingbirds, you know, right now, in December. All it takes is gumption, money, blowing off appointments, and a clear sense of who we are.
For the moment, at least, it seems we’re silent humans in a quiet adobe hovel on a prickly hillside covered with snow at 7,000 feet, just a few miles north of the great canyon of the Rio Grande, where the twisting ice-packed highway under towering cliffs lies frozen in blackest night…
Not surprisingly, that will have to do for now.
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