Twenty past ten at night. The town is truly emptied and quiet, no one is outside.
The storm was supposed to have started Friday. Nothing came all weekend except for for misty rain here and there. Then at five tonight it just started skydumping all at once, an inch of fat heavy snow in an hour.
The first half of the inch melted onto the still-warm pavement. The second half blanketed it all. The sun went down and took the temperature below freezing with it. Black ice, frosted and jeweled.
I walk out the front and onto the driveway watching my step and drinking in the hush.
As midnight approaches they say there’ll be more for a couple of hours. The same at noon tomorrow. The day after, solid sun that will push the number back above 32 Fahrenheit all afternoon.
Back here in the present the stillness is a blessing.
On the same driveway almost five years ago I cried to heaven that I wasn’t a professor anymore, just a guy in his drive looking for a next identity.
I was, though, technically, the same prof for three years after. Only in the summer past did I begin to turn into something else in all the ways.
Just before the inch hit I spoke for several minutes with a colleague from way back then. She’d retired well before the shit hit the fan for me. Her heart is in the right place but she humbly or fearfully refuses to do anything with her life, besides chug through it, with a husband addicted to Fox and teenage-mother grandchildren sliding in and out of her house.
In spite of the fact that we were relatively close, she knew and knows nothing about me, beyond an indistinct sense that I choose to rebel habitually.
So I told her some for once. There’s been this blog. It used to be just literary; now it’s a lot more political. Monetizing it is no longer beyond the pale for me.
She was all wow; she was both more and less impressed than the actual circumstances warrant. All I’ve done is lay groundwork for something that might be big.
I’m laying it well, and that may or may not matter, measured by the yardstick of abundance.
Either way, I spill therefore I am and it’s right.