Winter Series: But the fire is so delightful

The snow is here!

 

Last night, after gingerbread and eggnog at Matti and Lindsay’s, I knew it was coming.  I knew it because I’d seen the forecast, and I knew it because everyone was talking about it.  But mainly I knew it because I could smell it.  It’s the kind of smell that stings just a little in your nose, a dry smell, like newspaper, a wet smell, like spring water.  A little metallic like a handful of dimes. That is the smell of snow.

The snow, which is falling as I type, has pulled the drapes around Vancouver.  The sky is a low, colorless mass from which tiny particles shower down, as if we’re all huddled under a leaking bag of flour.   There is no sun, no shapely cloud, no sky to speak of.  I cannot see the mountains or the North Shore across the English Bay. Out the window the trees are green shadows; holly and spruce and fir are gradually becoming indistinguishable.  It is surreal and muted, an underwater day dream that reminds me of Eliot.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

 

 

To note the holiday season here in our small home, we’ve (and by we, Justin reminds you, I mean me) made a small hearth, over on the bookshelf, a meeting of the secular and the sacred: holly and fir snipped from the neighbor’s tree, and a small stuffed tree, made by Claire, two Ikea candles, and of course everything from Mountaineering to the Collected Whitman.  Not much, but it all adds up quite nicely, I think:

 

If we had no place to go, I’d say let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.  But, my hours with the snow are numbered as I’m off to Virginia tomorrow, where little rain clouds fill each day of the forecast.