Snow Dump

The first snow of the season doesn't announce itself; it just happens. You wake up in the morning to snow-covered yards and school closings and plows scraping their rusty bottoms on the roads. It falls to the earth like powdered sugar from a sieve: it's soundless and it floats through the air and it piles.

I, however, witnessed the first snow that came about a week ago. I had been in bed, reading Blue Hour, until about 1:30 when I dog-eared a page and turned off the light. My bedroom remained eerily bright -- I say eerily because the walls closest to my huge window had a soft orange color -- and I couldn't close my eyes hard enough to make everything black, so I got up and peeked through the blinds. I was shocked to see everything covered in white because it had been 70 degrees out just a few days before and since I hadn't turned the television on since I got back from my weekend home I heard no weather reports or forecasts for snow. It was beautiful for all the reasons that snow is beautiful: pure, soft, shimmering in certain light.

But, what was the orange color? It couldn't have been coming from the four 80-watt lightbulbs that line the back of our building; the entire sky was sour. I stood in front of the window, thinking how fucked-up nature could be, wondering if the pumpkin hue to everything was one of those wierd natural phenomenons or just pollution. The first snow had been corrupted by this bizarre orange sky, robbed of its sheen. It was as though someone had placed a fuzzy orange filter across my window, forcing me to see through an altered lens.

I couldn't sleep in a room as bright as winter dawn, so I stayed awake and thought about how snow can dump itself in inches and feet on top of you, nearly silently and within a very short time. And it's heavy.
*
While the first snow of the season was falling in Minnesota, my grandmother had cancer in Iowa. I found out two days before and it came just the same: suddenly and silently; buried in an old woman's broken body. I woke up to it, after years of good weather, after years of what we thought was luck but was really just ignorance. And the news was heavy and it continues to pile.

My thoughts haven't separated into sentences yet. They're still feeling. All I can do is write about how orange snow makes me think of the unnatural in the natural which makes me think of cancer in a uterus. And how fucked-up life can be.

Almost all of the snow has melted now. So, sometimes, I'm able to think about resilience and beauty, and that will get me through until the point that sentences form.