M
y wife, to her extreme chagrin, drove on American roads for the first time today. We left early, before breakfast, to procure our daily bread, and our timing proved fortuitous. The roads were bare as we turned off the driveway, but snow had already begun its siege, and the edges had been softened on the Upstate landscape by the time we reached the grocery store.
It's difficult rying to explain what it's like to drive on snow to someone who had never seen it a month earlier. The problem is, that driving on snow is exactly like driving on asphalt, precisely until it isn't anymore. More often than not, the change from the ordinary to the catastrophic loss of control happens very suddenly, with little warning -- a turn taken slightly too hard, a vaguely aggressive brake, and the vehicle turns into a 2-ton sled.
So you try to develop a serenity on the road. "I'm in no hurry," you tell yourself over and over, as the grey turns to white. "No hurry at all." The road is covered, and you pass on, and through, and in it.
The land up here is a magician's trick, over and over. The world is covered, and completely transformed; then uncovered, and made new again. The snow fort begins to run ragged, hardens with use, begins to lose its charm -- and then itself is covered by the next playful storm, and is rejuvenated; in layer after layer until the sun can be bothered to return and put all the toys back in their boxes.
The sky whips through these cycles of cover and nakedness as well (that saucy architect of the shifting land). There is nothing more sullen than a full winter sky; and nothing more serene than its spent clarity; white countenance shed upon the ground to make way for the stars. How the light hangs and is preserved on a winter night. How it soaks into the fiber of tree and earth, its glow sustains us til morning, if we will only step outside a moment and look.