December 27, 2010

Blowing snow and drifting snow in the dark outside the windows, like time lapse photos of some great white desert.

After Christmas Eve service I skipped the parties and came home, staring at the lights of the tree until I was too sleepy to sit up. Rose and drove to Atlanta in the first outriders of what would become this monumental storm, listening to an audio books version of Moby Dick. Though written rather more lushly than modern taste, it’s clearly the great American book, still. Mapple’s sermon alone is excellent almost beyond imagination. Melville also funnier than I remembered. Had the honor of experiencing Atlanta’s first white Christmas in memory, which was in fact very beautiful. Beka did not return from Colorado, but Linda and the boys were well. The boys are inseparable, very handsome, very different. Both are wrestlers and therefore in breathtaking physical shape. They showed me their wrestling videos, which were impressive, but they pinned their opponents too quickly for there to be much to see. One white boy in a singlet looks much like another at distance, so I had to keep asking who was who. We ate incessantly. Jonathan drove us through the snow to see the latest Narnia movie, and then we played cards until midnight. I rose early and drove north. Deliberately did not listen for the weather report. Just above Atlanta the roads were a hair’s breadth from impassable. My tractionless little Prius slid and fishtailed if I went over 25, but on we soldiered. Cars had skidded into the grass on both sides of the road for twenty miles or so, and the air throbbed with the lights of cops and tow trucks. Several cars towing trailers had swerved around almost blocking the lanes. We inched gingerly past. I kept going, thinking, for some reason, that things would improve as I headed north into the mountains. But, in fact they did, and from north Georgia on the highway was dry, though snow fell ceaselessly and the roadsides and hills were a glory of pure white. You could see far into the roadside forests, and I looked deep for animals. Off the highway on the streets of Asheville, things were much worse. The streets were lined with bundled pedestrians, by which I knew everyone was afraid to use their cars. I couldn’t get into the alley, but parked at the apartments across the street, where the long-traveling Prius is now also trapped and useless. Don’t know if the pickup has any traction. Might test that out today. My ice driving skills did come back on I-85, and that gives me a certain confidence.

The only mark in the snow is my tracks from when I went out on the porch to fill the bird feeders.

The tree has not dropped even a single needle.

Circe startles when something surprises her, a leftover from her life on the streets of New Orleans, I guess. Then it’s a claws-out panic escape over anything that lies in the way. Last night–though what on earth could have startled her I don’t know–it was my face. I was asleep, and what came suddenly to my dream when it happened was a vivid close-up of thorny stalks of briar. I’m fascinated by this, by the way a physical sensation turned instantly into an image in dream time.

Blizzard conditions. High wind warning. The bushes outside my study window look like a snowman trying to peeping Tom.

Evening. The snow blanket made the nearby mountains wonderfully visible. I think you could have seen anything as big as a dog moving over the whiteness between the black slashes of the trees. When sunset came it made those same mountains the most radiant rosy gold I have ever seen. They seemed not to reflect but to originate the light.