Snippet about Snow

Today is a good day to get a primeval word out of the dictionary and bash people over the head with it. Maybe something like, I don't know, "connubial" or perhaps "perspicuous." Any way to keep the heads rolling, really. Because what is life except empty words and the way you affect others?

This was what I wrote in my green notebook on the fourth day of the year. There were cherry blossom trees with arthritic branch systems, frozen under. I saw a formalism of frost that I hadn't ever seen before, or had never noticed before: total immersion under ice of one cherry tree. The whole tree had been soaked with melting snow and then dried and frozen and then melted again, and frozen again, so that each branch, all the way out to each terminal twig, was completely enveloped in a transparent layer of ice about a quarter inch thick. If I had had a mind to I could have snapped a twig off like an icicle, and the whole tree might have shuddered with the amputation. The whole tree might have glistened and become still for the part of it that it had lost.

Instead I imagined a whole world covered in a thin veneer of ice, every surface slick with ever-perspiring glass. Walking would be an entirely different animal. Maybe even a different form of life, or not a life-form at all. Minor, precisely calibrated movement, highly tensile and attuned to the distortion and degradation of the third-degree lever, would be at a premium. Or very, very sharp claws.

I wanted everything there in the snow, in the ice, wrapped in a cellophane and delivered to my doorstep. And there it was, I had only to run out into it and hazard my knees and ankles. Blue jeans are always so much less predictably awful when it comes to freezing wetness than they ought to be. Everyone who has worn blue jeans in the snow knows exactly what they are getting when they wet the jeans at all: a future of red-chapped legs, denim that is starch-stiff with cold and impossible to peel off with extremities [read: fingers] frozen dumb as a coffee can full of pens, and a natural melting and drying process that takes hours and leaves your jeans warped and fitting tight in the ass and blown out in the cuffs. And yet, there you go again, there I went, out into the snow with blue jeans on, thinking less of my clothes than my sheer bejanglement at the marvel of a snow-covered day.

You can really make a lot more money trading in souls and futures than you can ever dream of making in the lottery. The lotter pays more, but come on, everyone has a soul.