First Snow
It is Sunday and there’s snow outside. The first snow of the season is falling, just enough to make driving hazardous. Pay no attention to that slush slicked intersection and you are courting an expensive, inconvenient surprise that possibly will involve another of your townspeople.
There is no other place that I’d rather be than here at Starbucks, with the soulful music playing, conversations emanating from three or four baristas behind the counter. The snowfall has reduced the usual morning rush allowing employees to relax some. I finished reading a chapter from The History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, and cannot help but think about how life and death are inexricably connected, like Halloween and Thanksgiving. You cannot have harvest without the expenditure of labor, without the death of sown seed. You get something, when you give something. Nothing is free.
I also discovered The Mountains by D’Arcy McNickle. McNickle begins his poem about the mystique of the mountains in this fashion:
There is snow, now—
A thing of silent creeping—
And day is strange half-night . . .
These terse lines serve as the melody in the D’Arcy poem about the wisdom of the mountains:
Snow, snow, snow—
A thing of silent creeping
I know its ironical, but what I feel now staring through the large plate glass windows at the snowfall on State and 3rd, surely is similar to what is expressed by the poet. I feel as though I should return home to improvise an altar to the earth in the backyard.
To read for yourself the D’Arcy poem CLICK HERE.
