Impossible to ignore, this snow. There are other things to write...

Impossible to ignore, this snow. There are other things to write about – amputating a busted tub from a bathroom yesterday, someone asking what sort of tool represents the stage of life I’m at right now, botching the answer – but the snow presses and piles and demands to be considered. So I do. The drifts and banks, new hills. What’s under? What’s below? More snow, a sidewalk curb somewhere, a mitten, a car (seats and steering wheel so cold and darker than nightdark, all the light eclipsed. I imagine sitting shotgun in this cold cave, cocooned by winter, and a patient wait for warmth).

A winter storm when I was eight years old, or ten, iced everything. The branches sparkled and drooped, heavy from the weight of frozen water that encased every bough and twig. Twinkling! Magic! Transformed world! On the side yard, a group of birch trees, the branches brushed the ground and created a room inside, a fort with crystal curtains. To crawl in was to disappear, to exit the familiar yard, to be removed from the regular house at the end of a suburban cul de sac, from the world of parents and rules and fruit before dessert. To enter was to exit reality as it existed, a slipping into a new and separate world, not for grown ups or carpets or math quizzes, but for talking chipmunks, orange glow of fires across the night from other friendly forts, incantations in the tinkling of ice on ice as the branches brushed each other in the wind. This fort comes to mind often, not just in the midst of record snows, but when I think of how I’d want a room to feel in a house I’d build. Not in its iciness but in its enclosed and altering power, a mind-shifting space, a sanctuary that disappears you from the world you know.