Snowdrifting

The day after Christmas day the living room was edged with drifts of wrapping paper. I went outside, and the overnight rain had left drifts of snow edging every road and walk. It was a magnificent snow, deep and smooth, sparkling in sunlight, glowing at night. I have never lost the excitement of the morning after snow was predicted. Has it? Look out at the quality of light coming in around the blinds. Only snow can emit that cold glow presaging a virgin expanse. That glow contains all the excitement of snowball fights and angels and freedom from school and, now, freedom from going to work. I can hear the scrape of shovels against pavement and the whine of slipping tires, inconsequential sounds against the great hush of the world's down comforter.

I went on a bird walk with my niece Stacey. We got up at dark thirty and put on every bit of clothing we owned, waddled out to the car, and drove to a rendevous with more swaddled snow persons. We drove, and then walked, around a landfill that had been capped. Herds of deer the same color as the winter grasses grazed around the methane valves. It became a blustery day, cloudy, bringing the concept of wind chill to numbing life as we fumbled with our binoculars to identify the whizzing brown blurs Stace and her two anonymous padded friends would identify - "Oh, I make that four, no five, green-banded drift-skimmers, two females and three males. Oh, and look, there are three hawks, there by the third cedar on the left, a harrier and two red-tails." Most of the time I was still counting cedars long after the birds had disappeared. But I saw the bluebirds, a dozen or more, whose blueness slammed us all. Why were they here, all in a group on this coldest of days, and why were they so much more blue than any other bluebirds we had ever seen?

Stacey is in Guatemala now, starting her Peace Corps training, sending long emails nearly incoherent with excitement and Spanish. We are home, struggling to accept the death of one of our dear chinchillas the night we got home. And Robert's hospitalization with chest pains Monday morning, fortunately not a heart attack or blockage, but to come home from a feast of fun with family to a week of tears and anxiety hardly seems fair. I didn't really settle down until this evening following a 23-hour visit from my brother, one of the world's coolest people. I sat and drank my wine, and Robert made dinner and brought it out to me, and life was finally good.