11:33 pm
The corner of my street (Suburban Detroit)
I'm the first person to walk down the sidewalk. I can tell because snow has been falling for the last six hours and there isn't a single track other than mine. The toes of my boot kick up miniature snowstorms that fall behind me as I trod.
Even though it is snowing, the air is dry. It's as if there is only enough moisture to sustain the few flakes as they meander in spirals to their resting place. When the air is humid, snowflakes stick together in drop-like clumps. Those snows tend to be warmer, and in them you can feel that the sky longed desperately for rain.
Tonight there is little wind-- a blessing in the 16 degree weather.
I reach the corner. The road is slick black, and cars splatter a mix of water, oil and dirt from beneath their tires, tingeing the newly-fallen snow gray at the edges. Snow is always beautiful until human intervention. In fact, tonight's snow is falling atop old snow that has been a dreary shade of frozen brown-gray for days. I dig into the ground with the toe of my boot until I reach frozen soil and reveal a gradient scale of white to black.
It is almost midnight and still light enough for me to write. This is only partially due to the orange and white streetlights (every other of which has been put out to save the city government on their electric bills). Even when you manage to reach those rare places beyond the municipal halos, all the lights of man (headlights, neon signs, porch lights, televisions, cell phones, airplanes) reflect onto the white snow reflect onto the canopy of clouds reflect onto the white snow... This ping-ponging of light obscures the rich darkness. Occasionally a blue-black smear flutters like a raven in the distance. But it is never truly dark. Not in winter. Not in the suburbs.
I walk back slowly, pausing beneath a humming, white streetlight to look up. It is lovely weather to breathe. The cold oxygen respires thorough and deep in the lungs. The resultant carbon dioxide is visible momentarily, a reminder of vitality. A dozen flakes dance above me in pairs, countering each other rhythmically, waltzing to the ground.
"But it is never truly dark. Not in winter. Not in the suburbs."
ReplyDeleteI find this interesting, because I moved out of my suburban home last summer, and moved closer to the city (Shadyside area, right near Chatham). Whenever I visit the burbs at night, I find it so hard to see! There are hardly any street lights. Street lights are everywhere in the city of Pittsburgh, and with the lights reflecting off the snow, ambient light is times ten.
I'm really interested in all these contrasts, in how even this entry (like the next one) is so elementally focused around water.
ReplyDeleteTo give you some perspective on light, there's some really interesting light maps of the world and then one of the U.S. specifically. Last spring we were all amused that one of the students lives in that big, black hole in the middle of the U.S. It's a huge problem, light pollution :-(
Cassie -- This is my favorite kind of first-person writing, the vividly present-tense. It's like you've taken that classic novelistic opening ("it was a dark and stormy night") and given everything the texture and precise description it deserves. This being the first winter I've "enjoyed" for a long time, I appreciated the "lovely weather to breathe." True. That.
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