THE EIGHTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS

…I am a day behind on my Days, as by the time I might have posted anything our internet connection had been reduced to a blinking red light on the modem.  But right to it: the Eighth Day is (was) called “Snow Day.”  Although the term is pregnant with meaning for schoolchildren everywhere, alas, school’s already out and we are left with the awareness and celebration of snow, that brightening white stuff that is so sorely missed when it’s gone, and the weather outside is frightfully dank and gray. 

The fact of Central Illinois’s’s’s dreary winters led me to channel the following:

Central Illinois Christmas Poem of Woe 
by Central Illinois

Gray above,
Brown below.
If I could, I would I'd
Call out the sun,
down the snow.

The fact that someone did call down the snow on Snow Day seemed apropos of something, if only a kiss from Lady Luck.  It has brightened things up considerably, in spite of the fact that we will sculpt no snowballs or persons out of this fluffy, powdery stuff (although it was quite easy to shovel). Feeling brightened, and bemused, and wonderstruck one fine day, post-snowfall, I wrote some more upbeat verses:

POOLS AND FLAKES

new powder, clean and light,

dropped last night,

banks the windward corners of

lawns and beds

with bright snow-shadows

it rests in cracks and pocks

of sidewalk and street,

whites the hollows

in black dirt and brown leaf

it pools without puddling or rippling,

off-white and quiet

until clear sun pushes hard through the

wandering, luminescent seams between

the blue-gray curtain-clouds

that float and morph and ponder form:

the light chases all hint

of shadow, shade, tint or texture

from the surface of the frost puddles,

flashing back to the very first white

…the deep-breath rush of gusts

does sky make wind or wind make sky?

bit by bit strips the dark tree skeletons of their skunk-stripes of white

interlocked crystals,

layered and caked,

and lifts the snow as flakes again

through the wending light

—where they all wink

like tiny shards of mirror flying past—

revealing the light’s invisible beaming through the air.

the wind pushes the snowflakes along

from behind, toward the East,

but I had never thought:

it’s drawing them in its wake as well,

from the West

—Well, it impels them, either way:

now with straight-line speed,

now in regular curves, roller-coastering, riding the tension between traveling wind

and gravity's down-draw home

each curvaceous line of white

ascends unseen slopes, cresting, diving, and again:

a wave now, as in radio-, as in micro-, as in gamma-

matter made energy by motion?

each spoked and faceted flake

—think about it!—

coin-flips, cartwheels, stalls and spins

its way through the rush forwards,

as a silver coin flops its irregular way down through water:

when one angled surface or the other

meets the light and bats! it to my eye

—it's matter again, made,

a particle as I observe,

destined to, with a flea-sized sound

of shattering ice,

strike against house or tree.

each flake winks at me

several times in its journey

from the right side of window one

to the left frame-edge of window two

…thousands, then, of winks—lifetimes.

I could have missed it.

Although I appreciate the snow, I really wish the view out my front window weren’t of houses and streets with their ugly gray slush, but of a rolling landscape, woods and meadows, river and horizon gladdened by their frosting of white.  I want the postcard, not the reality.  I can, however, appreciate snow and ice in an existential way, as the force opposing unbridled heat.  Heat is Yang, cold is Yin, and a cycling balance must exist between them.  In a nutshell, I’m glad Earth is not an oven, even if it means enduring Winter’s cold and drear.  In fact, the world as we know it today is the product of a succession of ice ages, the ages-old seesaw between freeze and thaw.  Far from being a deadly scourge, the ice spawned a stunning diversity of large, cold-hardy animals.  Many of them finally died out along with the glaciers themselves around 10,000 years ago, leaving us only the moose and bison here in the Lower 48.  What’s more, the glaciers have left ridiculously fertile soil in their wake, and the cold, snow and ice all keep germs, molds and tropical diseases at bay.  Ice is nice, if you take the long view.  When was the last time you thanked it?  I do not think I ever have, but one gift of writing is the way it helps you appreciate things you never thought much about before—so, hey, thank you, ice and snow and cold.  Thanks.  I hope that you thank them too, in your own way.

Thank you, too, snow pants and wool socks, scarf and hat.  When I came in from shoveling, I was not cold at all.  Au contraire, I was sweating profusely.  Then, when I stripped my upper body down to my long johns in the single-digit temps I was standing in the dark by the back porch light, and the water vapor was steaming off of me as if I were a boiling pot of water.  To think that, in warmer conditions, in spite of its intensity said evaporation would be invisible!

I will end on this note:  the next time we do get some good packing snow (on Sunday, Day Eleven, perhaps, the Festival of the Three Kings?), you need not limit yourself to making a traditional snowman.  One of my best winter memories is of making a snow ape on my front lawn.  I was pleased with the results, yes, but the best part was losing myself in the creative act.  For that time, I was in the Zone, and no worries.  It’s true that some random driver took the trouble to ride up on my lawn and smash my creation to bits, but I had already had my fun and bless him, I’ll bet he had his….Another time, I made a space alien.  The point is to lose yourself—or perhaps you are really being MORE yourself—in a creative act.  It’s a beautiful thing, but doesn’t have to be snow sculpture.  You could write a haiku about the snow, or like my wife make a bunch of paper snowflakes.  Unhook, I say, any concerns about the quality of the product and become one with the Process.

MUSICAL CHOICES: Too many to mention in the time allotted (the wife and child are now home), but a lot more snow-themed tracks besides “Frosty the Snowman” and “Let It Snow” can rock your snowbound socks off. “Snowman” by Bare Naked Ladies; “Snowblind” by Black Sabbath; and “Winter Snow” by Booker T. and the M.G.’s, to name just a few from the “groups starting with ‘B’” category.  Check ‘em out!