First Snow
After researching for my Green Earth News article for the week, but before actually writing it, I applied to a series of copywriting and editorial jobs that were posted on LinkedIn. I have, incidentally, completely changed my strategy to make no secret whatsoever of the fact that I don’t ever expect to be properly employed. One of the jobs to which I applied almost dismissively is located on the shores of Cayuga Lake, which led me into the digressions of seeing whether it would be possible to find a place to live in that pipe dream and to get from such a home to the place of business. And lastly, I wondered what it would be like to travel that distance in winter.
I looked up just at the end of my daydream to see that the year’s first light flecks of snow had begun to drift past my window. It has been unseasonably warm in recent days, and it was just about a week ago that I watched the still quite full tree in front of my apartment shed its bright yellow leaves in quick, single-file succession over the course of the day, until it was all but bare by nightfall.
This afternoon’s snow inched into view like a timid child being urged onto a grade school stage. But soon it was dancing wildly, thrilled by the attention. I watched the flakes grow from tiny, barely-visible crystals of would-be rain into dense, sheer-white, cottony precipitation. I nearly turned away from it to settle back to work, but this was the first snow - this was a moment too easily missed, and it had waited for my eyes to meet the window so that I was made a private witness to the sudden turning of the seasons.
So I embraced it at my front window where it seemed closest, and I studied it at my south window where I could see the wind pulling it across my view between the buildings, then tugging it in another direction off in the distance. And then I leaned upon my kitchen table to watch it twirling in open air and vanishing up towards the spires of the church and down toward the neighbors’ green grass.
The wind today was apparently without direction, and with the thick snowflakes dangling on the other side of the glass and tracing interlocking spirals, my view was like looking out from the center of a snow globe. What I wonder is, by God, who is it that’s shaking the world? And why, between the first jostle of the tree branch and the gradual settling of snow, does everything feel so damn still?
I looked up just at the end of my daydream to see that the year’s first light flecks of snow had begun to drift past my window. It has been unseasonably warm in recent days, and it was just about a week ago that I watched the still quite full tree in front of my apartment shed its bright yellow leaves in quick, single-file succession over the course of the day, until it was all but bare by nightfall.
This afternoon’s snow inched into view like a timid child being urged onto a grade school stage. But soon it was dancing wildly, thrilled by the attention. I watched the flakes grow from tiny, barely-visible crystals of would-be rain into dense, sheer-white, cottony precipitation. I nearly turned away from it to settle back to work, but this was the first snow - this was a moment too easily missed, and it had waited for my eyes to meet the window so that I was made a private witness to the sudden turning of the seasons.
So I embraced it at my front window where it seemed closest, and I studied it at my south window where I could see the wind pulling it across my view between the buildings, then tugging it in another direction off in the distance. And then I leaned upon my kitchen table to watch it twirling in open air and vanishing up towards the spires of the church and down toward the neighbors’ green grass.
The wind today was apparently without direction, and with the thick snowflakes dangling on the other side of the glass and tracing interlocking spirals, my view was like looking out from the center of a snow globe. What I wonder is, by God, who is it that’s shaking the world? And why, between the first jostle of the tree branch and the gradual settling of snow, does everything feel so damn still?