After we had dinner, I walked home from the subway in a snowstorm, past all the houses with their holiday decorations. I snapped a photo on my phone of the snow falling through the holiday lights by the brownstones. The snow was falling so fast that in the picture the flakes resembled scores of ghostly tiny comets streaking to the mantled ground. What if our minds are cameras set to a narrow aperture, unable to perceive the full reality around us, and we are in the midst of a complicated storm, one that is ongoing, dynamic, imperceptible? And what if my mother were in that storm? It was in the
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