Trying to Hold on to Today

I'm trying to memorize the day. It's the sort of weather that is too good to be real, it belongs in a book or on the big screen in tales like Serendipity or Sleepless in Seattle, where everything has a purpose, a hidden meaning towards a perfect inevitability. A movie moment.

There is a paper-white sky and the sun is a perfect pencil-eraser spot of worn brightness, the sky matching the snow in an infinity of white-on-white. The wind whips dry snowflakes in every direction (here, at the edge of a long, open meadow, the snow flies up as it explodes against our windows). If you try to follow the flurries, it's a traffic jam, a rave of snowflakes. All the dead grasses lean to the left and black branches litter the ground, broken arthritic fingers pointed in accusation at the sky, half-buried in thin drifts.

The children are splashes of color squinting against the particulate wind. Hot pink and bright purple and Christmas green bundled up in layers of scarves and hats and gloves and boots of mismatching colors and patterns and pom poms stomping past the backyard. Their voices are carried up and away, high-pitched squeals and calls to one another to watch as they sled down the inclines and tumble over one another like puppies in a winter's blanket. The snow is too dry for snowballs, but that doesn't keep them from trying.

The wind has a sound, almost a voice, that calls and coughs and whispers and whines. The wind shrieks off the rooftops in clouds of snow and rumbles around the basement door as if grumbling to be let in. The cats watch with indifference. The windows buckle and whistle, bent in their frames. Then it's calmer, quieter, but only for the moment before it picks up with renewed energy, another bombast to let fly again.

It's one of those days, and I try to hold it with my eyes and words, but it's like the dry snow powdering in my mittens, refusing to stay.