I probably shouldn’t say anything, right? You know how fickle the gods are. But it bears noting how fine a thing it is not to be dealing with snow.
So far this fall the jetstream has whisked the stormy weather away, not letting the precipitation come south. We’ve had week after week of mostly blue skies and daytime highs running 15 degrees above “normal.” It’s still gotten quite cold, down into the single digits, but walking outside in the morning is a treat, the way the sun burns down. Smooth, dry dirt and rocks to step on. No wind. The sound of wings fluttering after I put out birdseed.
No windshield scraping. No falling down. No foot stomping. No wet, muddy boots laid out on newspapers by the door. I can feed the birds wearing a fleece bathrobe and Crocs. Best of all, the cold doesn’t cut the way it does with more humidity. More like a friendly, magical chill that goes away by mid-morning.
Now, this is not half bad.
The forests will burn in the summer, but for the moment, this is not half bad. Leaving aside the dire consequences of a low snowpack in the mountains, it has not been snowing here and I have paid attention. I’m not sure what that means, but I have. It’s like someone wanted me to see this, or at least have a break. That would be one angle.
The other would be something akin to the hissing sound of a wave sliding back into the ocean. A very long, long interval waiting to be read.
UPDATE: Yup. A winter storm watch was announced for Thursday, right after I posted this…
UPDATE #2: Now it’s a winter storm warning for 8-12 inches. Geez.
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79-80 degrees that’s what its been here in Tucson. No snow for us-rain maybe-tomorrow. What I wouldn’t give for just a little bit of cold, maybe snow. John, I am envious. The waiting for the new snow, maybe too cold for our my old bones, but the adventure, the excitement that the universe has given us a change, something to look forward to. Something new and glorious. Yes, I am envious!
As I remarked to someone on Twitter, I don’t mind the snow for the first six or eight hours. After that it’s, “Oh shit, I have to go to the bank” or something, when the last thing you want to do is actually go anywhere in a car.
Everything will be really beautiful for a day or two, and then 10 days of mud. (No outdoor exercise.) If it gets cold and stays cold, you can walk on the snow or frozen mud, but the compressed snow around the house and driveway turns to deadly solid ice. Just getting in the car is risky! Over a spell of months, such conditions can do one’s psyche serious grief, although the beauty of clouds and mountains keeps you going for a while.
So there’s all that. [ahem] But I do like drama, and if it snows, we’ll have some. Besides, if it doesn’t snow, next summer will be hell.
Having gravel, grass, or pavement near the house would make a huge difference. I get so tired of cleaning boots… Of course, there are homes in Taos that have curbs.
Maybe we just need to get one, although then I wouldn’t hear the coyote outside the door like I did between these last two sentences!
Picking up on your throwaway observation that “someone wanted me to see this, or at least have a break”….
Funny, isn’t it, how we all carry around inside us this sense that the stuff that happens is part of a design with us in mind. I feel it too, unbeliever though I am. Something beautiful in the external world, some happiness in one’s private world – “Well, I just got lucky there” never seems adequate. There’s always the buried thought that this particular chunk is part of a pattern, that “it all adds up.”
That’s also true of bad experience. Suicides are story-tellers too. They connect the bad stuff into an inexorable narrative with them as the failed protagonists at the center of it. Yet sometimes bad things just happen to happen. No rhyme or reason. It would be better in such cases to think experience was all or mostly random.
But complete chaos and randomness are more than we can bear or perhaps even imagine. For good or ill, we are story-tellers and always have been – since we dwelt in caves and squatted by fires. Every piece you write testifies to that impulse in you, my friend.
We’re all part of the design. Life brings us face to face with exactly what we need to see—and whatever we’ve been avoiding. Things shift instantaneously according to our unconscious input. That’s why it’s better to be conscious!