Tonight it snowed. A wind howling through the corridors of streets -- racing, searching, or running away from something else altogether? Then the skies opened up and the white began to fall. Tonight, indeed, it snowed.
Earlier, it seemed a tentative entity. A light dusting that trickled down almost, seemingly, by accident. Perhaps like a new cook in the kitchen unsure about how much salt to add, and hesitant to add more, for fear or ruining what has already become a work well done. The wind quickly swept away the new addition, almost so that you weren’t quite sure if it had really fallen.
But if one stopped and looked closely, the evidence was clear. In the chiselling lines of the street edges, between the flat of the road and the slight rise at the curb, white lines gleamed. Like ruler lines of cocaine ready to be inhaled, the white dusting beckoned, attempting to tempt to the other side.
The other side of winter, where we must bid adieu to the lasting rays of warmth residue of months gone by. Before the sun sank with aplomb, and before the wind chuckled its way through the streets gloating over its solitary reign, daylight held us back from crossing the line. The sun came in when it seemed we were about to take the other side, each time pulling back the clouds to announce its presence, in case we might have forgotten.
Could we have forgotten you, whom we most miss before you are gone? The question echoes upon the blanketed white that now adorns the forlorn asphalt. Forsaken we have been, but we cannot cry; we know this abandonment well for it is the routine shift of day and night. We know that for the brevity of cold darkness, we have yet that solace of morning light.
This is the quietude of winter’s cacophony. Amidst the thunder of wind in the trees, silence pervades. Silence the deletion of noise, accompanying the deletion of colour, represented by the stretching horizon of white. Blank.
Keep still for a moment. Do you hear it? Feel it? The chorus of a thousand million tiny voices, as they are shovelled away without another thought, a miracle in itself for each snowflake has never existed before and shall never be again. How do we know? We cannot count each that falls, as unable are we to trace each tear that ever had been shed, or count each star that ever blinked, or remember each dream that floated away beyond unmoving eyelashes. Should we not try? Tonight it snowed.
