Seriously. A foot is on the forecast, which is good. An X arrived at last by mail, by a hundred thousand gusts of wind by night. It is white and granular and all over the place. But it is blustery and it has kept me up. It sounds like a sandstorm. Flecks, not flakes, sandblasting the house. Snowblasting the house. Does that count? Can it strip paint from wood? It sounds like it could. So it is cold and weather's here around us like a blanket. It is all along the ground like a rind, like a round sung by schoolchildren a hundred years ago that has finally settled down across our brows and hands.
It sounds like it would sting. This wind. This combination of it over everything. The old house's windows are not completely snug. You can tell in these kinds of situations especially. Rattling. The thundering of gust against glass. Luckily we are on the inside half of that equation. Else we would be cold. We would be beautiful and silent, over and still.
Snow day is what the local news claims. I am a stickler for them, and this seems in no way like a day for snow and staying home to me. I am from another country, one that "very rarely" cancels classes. We consider our education, our work, our continued productivity important. We are stoic and we are cold and we are covered in this most of the year. We will snowshoe, snowblow, cross-country ski to work if necessary. Snowmobile, dogsled, trudge. We have methods of counteracting weather, or working within its bounds, against its tyranies. But here, in the South, it is a different story. The weather balls that glow against the night (they are setup by all the local weather stations, and they write songs to pair with the interactions of the weather balls with the world—they are warnings, blinking, colored, beacons in the cold) suggest the mood. How should we take this? As a slap? As a warning blast? As a punishment for the things we've done, come at last and long overdue?
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