Another Whiteout
Force of Nature
She had eyes so blue they looked like weather.
My favorite lyrics, by Phoebe Bridgers (It’ll All Work Out, 2017) sing their way into my head this morning as I open the kitchen door and look into the blizzard and taste the sublime white snow flying in my face and see three-foot drifts on the deck and try to coax the dogs up an impossible white mountain for a breath of impossibly fresh air.
A storm wakes up my brain like few other things can.
I was born into northern England November weather, grew up in Netherlands weather, came of age in West Indies weather, and settled in four-season New England weather.
I love and live for weather. It profoundly shapes my mood and underwrites my creative energy. A gray sky with no breeze and no apparent motion is like a vacuum. Heavy, humid midsummer days days weigh on me like a fire blanket. Sunshine is a sacred gift for the soul.
But the wind? Big wild window-shaking wuthering wind? The wind blows life and vitality into every cell of me and invites me – urges me – to rise to my own occasion, rise to an impossible height, write a thousand words an hour, run marathons, climb mountains. The boldest espresso, the sweetest, most explosive sugar high. The wind is my manna. Wind is nature’s way of embracing me. And a storm is a fierce and passionate embrace. Rainstorm, thunderstorm, snowstorm. A storm cleanses me, nourishes me, slakes my deepest thirst.
The wind is my manna
I sit at the kitchen table, sip a cup of strong coffee, hear the wind huff and my hardy old house rattle and hum. I write my way through the storm. Every half hour I stand up and peer through the windows to watch the dense torrent of snow rushing around the sky, building monuments in my garden as it blows in every direction, colliding with itself in an ethereally choreographed dance. A murmuration not of starlings but of flakes of frozen water.
I’m aware that this blizzard will blow itself out. It will run out of momentum. The drifts will melt and fade into the earth. The dogs will run on grass again, or mud.
Meanwhile, I drink it in.
