Snow day!

Last week we got snow in Seattle!

It started snowing on Monday, and I was so delighted. I just love snow, I always have. My mom has reminded me of the strange childhood behavior I had - whenever it snowed, I'd go out to our backyard and just lie there, staring at the snow...in a t-shirt. And it's true. Well, I can't account for the t-shirt part, but I do remember lying there, thinking that maybe if I stared long enough, I'd be able to discern the individual crystal snowflakes. I was always searching for proof that every snowflake is in fact, as unique as we were taught in school; always wondering if they really looked like the paper snow flakes we cut out of coffee filters in art class.

There's just something about snow. Like when you walk through woods (on a snowy evening, with Robert Frost) and it muffles everything so completely you can hear individual snowflakes landing. How when the sun is shining it somehow sparkles yellow and blue, and at the same time remains blindingly white.

It makes sense, that old myth about the Eskimos (who I believe are actually the Yup'ik and Inuit peoples) having hundreds of words for snow - it can be wet, dry, powdery...Hm, they have a lot more experience with snow than I do, so of course they have more words. But I am reminded of how every snow day, the question of whether it will be the right kind of snow to build a snowman just added to the anticipation.

I grew up in Virginia, and my father always scoffed at how people in my town didn't know how to drive in snow.

Well, compared to Seattle, Virginia is doing great in the preparedness-for-snow department.

We got about two inches. The city shut down. On Monday the main bus out of my neighborhood just wasn't running. Period. On Tuesday the roads hadn't been plowed, or sanded, or salted. The result of all this was that it felt like a lot more snow than there really was, because it was so inhibitory. For me, that was great. I don't have a car, I didn't need to be anywhere. So I got to enjoy it. But I was amused. People say that it snows so infrequently in Seattle that it is just not worth it to invest in snow equipment. I wonder if this will change with climate change. What I remember from school is that climate change predictions for this area call for less snowpack in the mountains - I'm not sure if that would also translate to less snow here (the snowpack on the mountains has more to do with precipitation patterns than temperature).

Moonlit contemplations

The past couple of days have been pretty typical for this time of year in Seattle: drizzly, damp, cold. But the weather cleared up this evening - the sky was clear, the moon was out, there was a breeze strong enough to remember that it was fall but not strong enough to feel the need to arm yourself for weather. Even though I now live in a part of Seattle where I feel a lot safer being out alone at night, I'll admit that my childhood fear of the dark lingers enough that I still don't tend to do so. But tonight felt so welcome after all this drizzle damp, so I put on some sneakers and headed out.

You remember when you were little, that thing your mom taught you about dealing with the annoying younger brother? That the more annoyed you become by his behavior, the more effort he'll put in to egg you on -- but if you aren't bothered, he gets bored and goes away? I'm slowly discovering that all the questions, anxieties, and uncertainties in my life right now act much the same way. They create a lot of noise and clutter in my brain, but are easiest to deal with when I don't freak out about the noise and clutter - left to their own devices, they settle down.

I end up in a kind of "chicken or the egg" contemplation of the evening and these fluttering questions. The night was peaceful - was that what allowed me to relax enough to settle the fluttering? Or was the night peaceful because I'd settled the fluttering, and the quiet in my mind let me enjoy the evening?

Regardless, the nature of the evening rid me of agendas. I felt grateful to have been given this space, this stillness, in the midst of my fluttering uncertainties. So I let my feet decide which way they wanted to take me. Trusting that I'll get to where I'm going because where I'm going is right here. Knowing that I'll make it home when it is time, because my feet can know and my brain does not need to drive all the time.

I hear the wind go past my ears and the rhythm of my sneakers hitting the pavement with each step. I smell the landscapes of Seattle-ite yards - pine, lavender, rosemary, dried leaves damp on the sidewalk. The moon, though only a little more than half full, is illuminating the night so that the clouds shone in stark contrast to the night sky. At the peak of each rolling hill, the city lights blink and glimmer in the distance. And to the west - darkness, where land drops into the Sound.

Something about nighttime in the suburbs really resonates with me. The sun goes down, the street lights come on, and everyone is cozy inside making dinner, putting children to bed, sleeping early because they have real jobs in the morning. And so the sidewalks are all yours, the shadows, the sky. I always end up anthropomorphizing the cars, tucked away against the curbs for the night.

I found the empty streets tonight dustily familiar. My mind resurrected childhood memories of taking walks after dinner with my father, on days when the chaos of our household was overwhelming me. Perhaps we would talk, my dad and I, about what was upsetting me, but I don't remember. The important thing was the stillness, the break from the chaos. The streets were so wide, empty, inviting. There was space for me, for my thoughts. Nighttime empty streets don't ask or need, they just allow you to continue placing one foot forward after another.

Someone expressed to me recently that all the quarter-life crises I have - those times in which all those fluttering questions seem to be overwhelming me and weighing me down - are not a sign that I'm falling apart or breaking down, but a sign that I'm growing. And I suppose that sounds a bit schmaltzy (in fact this entire post is a bit more schmaltzy than my norm), but I dunno, it sounds good doesn't it?