some thoughts on snow.

i am still new enough here that every day really and truly feels like i am magically existing in some sort of fantastic winter wonderland... been walking the dogs twice a day and the mornings are quite different from the nights. i have observed many things.

1) the snow sparkles much more intensely at night. i am guessing this is due to the drop in temperature, but i have no explanation as to why that would matter to an already crystallized water molecule. All i know is: it's a fact. Night time is the right time.

2) Pretend smoking is still super fun.

3) i love to walk by peoples' driveways after a fresh snowfall; all of the comings and going of the various vehicles create amazing geometries (diamonds, triangles, perfect parallelograms) and one day i will document this because IT IS REALLY IMPORTANT.

4) When i was little my best friend's family had special icicle ornaments that they would hang on their christmas tree. They were precious spirals of delicate glass dusted with silvery glitter, and i Loved Them Ferociously. But in later years i found myself coming back to the thought of them; i saw icicles out in the world everywhere–on eaves, railings, bumpers, and the like–but when had anyone ever seen an icicle on a tree?? Well guess what friends: tonight i saw them. They are fully real. It's pretty simple: snow piles up on boughs. Then: melting comes. Then the temps gradually drop, slowly freezing gravity in its tracks. i stopped dead in my tracks and actually pulled at one to make sure it was truly ice and not some sort of whimsical urban decoration... The dogs were inquisitive. i fed them the shards, and i think a little dent in my heart popped out. Reaching max capacity every day.

5) The latest of these Extra-Fascinating Things that i have been paying attention to are sounds. There is your basic: the soft shuhsh shuh shuhsh of tromping through fresh, powdery snow. Then you get your squeaky, creaky snow, which makes sounds like you are walking on styrofoam. There is the crunch, cranch, cronch of breaking into your crustier snowbanks, and then there is my favorite, my latest discovery: the drumbreak (just made that up. right now). Basically here's how it goes. Snowfall. melt. cold snap. ice sheet! repeat. Then add a layer of fresh snow and pack it down with a snowplow. Now you get to walk on it. And the weirdest sounds come out... like there are entire caverns beneath your feet. You can hear your boots breaking through the ice layers to other hidden layers and releasing a bunch of trapped air, echoing within itself and resonating. i can only describe the (immensely pleasurable) feeling (and accompanying soundscapes) as breaking through the skin of a drum. It feels so bad it's good.

6) This list is over. Tune in next time for such hits as: snow being blown off the trees on a sunshiney morn and falling like glitter from the sky in front of your kitchen window while you wash the dishes and try not to pass out from the beauty of it all, which animal made those tracks?, and: hey, why won't this snow form a decent snowball?!

(Also, that last late-night dog run, when it's so cold that your ears go from numb to fiery-frozen then back to numb again is really not all that bad when you are running up a dark road surrounded by evergreens towards the beckoning Pleiades and the whole world around you is glistening like sugar)