Winter storm

Out my window, snow has been falling steadily for a few hours, giving my view of the garden the noisy quality of a 1990s TV screen. There was a channel on French TV growing up, that offered premium movies, and occasionally, on Saturday nights, forbidden content. Because my Dad wouldn’t pay, all my sister and I could see on the channel was noise, a wintry sky striped with vertical ice. The audio itself was garbled, making every show or ad sound like an alien production, a failed attempt by some faraway species to communicate something, to mean something. What were they trying to say? On Saturday nights, muffled words turned into eerie moans.

Actual snow doesn’t try to say anything. Flakes rush to the ground, hurried and absent-minded, like commuters at dawn. Flakes don’t mind being tightly packed, or trampled on. They let themselves harden into ice, if that’s the way seasons go, or they melt and flow back to the rivers and the sky. In the morning, they start their commute again. Snow isn’t the cryptic echo of an alien production, it is the answer to a physical inevitability.

I try to be more like snow. If I write about my day, or converse after tea, I do not ask “Why is it?”, for how should I presume? I am one flake in a sky of billions, falling and rising endlessly. I add wood to the fire when ashes grow cold, put the kettle back on the stove when cups empty out. I like to believe I speak clearly, say just what I mean. There is nothing garbled in my ways.

They say the storm ends tomorrow. Unlike the channel of my youth, this curtain will lift for free. When it finally does, and the howling wind mutters, I’ll be out with my shovel, knee deep in fluff, craving nothing. For a while it will look as if snow has cancelled its travel plans. Stretched on the smoothed out ground, belly up and facing the sun, it will look like it’s taking a vacation.

I will see everything clearly. The mother looking for food in the remains of a devastated banquet. The trees assessing one another like weary sorcerers after a battle. Even the river flowing silently, careful not to be seen moving about under its cloak. I will not need to ask anyone to let me watch or hear.

I will have been granted access, and nature will be singing to me.