Snow Fall

Posted on May 8, 2003 in Book of Days North Carolina Weather

Note: This is twenty-third in a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about a cold snap..

The part of Durham where I lived before The Wits End consisted of straight avenues that slashed across each other at right angles. The houses — built during the 1950s veterans’ loans boom — were lined up precisely along the street and strictly parallel to each other. The contractors had the mercy to vary the design slightly so that by varying the shade of paint and the variety of tree that you planted out front, searchers could find your address easily.

The second winter that I lived there, it snowed heavily. Three days of enclosure started my heart on strumming a dull, jabbing beat on my rib cage. My legs protested “We want to move!” Thus, I came to the moment when I knew I could not sit through another minute of that listless white noise. So, though it was eight o’clock on a Sunday evening, I pulled on two layers of socks, long fishnet underwear, a down jacket, my fuzzy grey hiking boots. Against the exclamations of my roommates who could see no point in leaving the comfort of the four bedroom duplex, I stepped out into the cold.

Earlier, the city scraped the streets, leaving a thin layer of new frost, broken ice, and snow flakes from a lazy afternoon storm. I heard only the wind teasing the naked elms and, now and then, a television set playing too loud.

I trudged towards the nearest main street and checked to see if there was life at the laundromat. Businesses along that whole block extinguished their lights early that night for want of customers and fear of larger drifts ro be formed in the passing of clouds during the night.

As I stood at the window of the laundromat — feeling disappointed that I could not go inside to warm my hands next to one of the dryer windows as I talked with the attendant — I heard a schlussing sound. I turned, ready to defend myself, however pathetically, against the attack of the wendigo come out of the north to steal the warmth I hoarded beneath my skin. A creature that was red as a brick tobacco warehouse slid along the center of the street. It eased itself to a stop at a red light, leaned on an extra pair of licorice stick legs, and turned to study me with enormous, single-lensed eyes.

I nodded to the cross-country skier and he returned the gesture. When the light greened, he moved on, vanishing in the darkness beyond the North Carolina School of Science.

My soles of my feet felt like a pair of lead plates, loosely clamped to the ends of my legs. Nevertheless, I raced home. I breathed the news of what I had seen and my delight at my witnessing it to three, doughy faces that glowed silver in the light of the television set. My roommates — a pair of good old boys and a beer-sucking Xerox repairman, stared at me. I went upstairs to think about it, alone, in the backroom overlooking the yard that had nothing in it except a collapsing garage and a snow-covered lawn that stretched seamlessly into the neighbor’s yard.

I hated that house and those people ever after. They did not know how to sing while they drew a breath of the cold night air or how to dance with the snowflakes.

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In case you were wondering, I don’t present the raw work to you. After I get to a comfortable (or forced) stopping place, I carry my notebook to the computer and write what has erupted from me during the session. You see refined sugar here, not cane in the rust-bottomed fields.

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Tomorrow’ topic/prompt: Write about a premonition..