Priceless gifts

I nearly missed seeing it.  Cold gray and snow have piled up so high that one tends to keep their eyes on the narrow passages through the days this long winter.  My eyes had been trained on Wednesday chores, looking down as I picked up after The Guys.  I don’t know what made me stand up straight and look out the window for a second, but if I hadn’t, I would have missed it.

Brilliant sunlight flashed from within long ice stilettos all along the lower edge of the roof.  Melting lightsticks sculpted by energy that people are not feeling as heat were individuals with different sizes and shapes, no twins among them, each piece exquisite alone, all of them together unplanned public art.  I was the lone viewer.   The shapes, the play of the light, colors more beautiful than my eyes needed to see , but I took my time enjoying it all.

The snow is thigh high out there.  I can’t even open my back door.  People winter-weary talk about little else but weather troubles they’ve had and weather troubles on the way and when will this end, will this tedious wearing winter ever end?

I have a new outlook.  I’ve been transformed by the view out the window yesterday.  This is wondrous art.  I couldn’t ever afford to pay for it in order to see it, so I am now happy to have it for free.

And it being Valentine’s Day, please accept this token of my regard, along with my wish that you have a

 

Post/Pre-snow report

When the snow stopped last night a person would have believed that people would have to take another day to tunnel out of their hidey-holes before the world could properly operate.  I woke at five this morning and checked the school closings, half-expecting that we’d all have another day off, but other than schools in remote areas which are starting two hours late, we are all at our customary posts.

This is not to say that things are back to normal.  The roads are plowed, but post-plowing snow fell and is packed into rutty tracks which slow everyone down to about half the posted speed limits.  People are at work and the coffee shop was busy, but customers everywhere else seem to be occupied with more pressing matters.  This leaves the employees time to compare stories about their personal sagas in The Big Snow.   When it comes to building a sense of community, you can’t beat shared adversity.  The world today is a big love-in.

Well, it’s that here.  That’s not true everywhere in the state.  For example, that city I’m headed to for art classes tomorrow has a gathering that is probably not all friendship and good will.  As snow is forecast for tomorrow afternoon, a seventy mile drive to join this assemblage is something I’m carefully weighing today.

Life postponed due to snow

One thing is certain.  The days of trying to impress kids with tales of how hard winters were back when we were young are over.  This winter has been frozen to nearly twenty degrees below zero and has been buried under huge snowfalls that remind me of when I was struggling the half-mile or mile to school.  I lived in a city then where the usual practice was to get out early and shovel the walk.  To leave it unshoveled would be shameful unless you were so elderly that your neighbors would be shamed to leave it for you to do and so they would make sure your walk complied with city law and community standards.

I don’t live in that city anymore, but in a suburb where there are no sidewalks to shovel.  The mail is left in a curbside rural mailbox and snowplows that clear the streets have the ditch in front of the house to dump the snow in.  I haven’t actually heard a plow yet and it’s nearly noon and there’s been no mail delivery today either because winter is calling the shots and winter says, “Stay inside until I’m done barricading your doors closed.”

So today is a knitting day.  Another warm scarf will not go amiss around here.

This is the one I’m working on.  It has the non-season-appropriate name “Rainy Day Scarf” and it’s made from a soy wool-silk yarn, not the one pictured, but one in colors of a tropical sea.

Not that I am convinced that a warm tropical place really exists, of course.