Epistles

Once the sleep kicked in I could’ve slept forever. The streets outside are white, same as the walk & the yard, despite the plow. The sun is out now but there is no place to go. All the trees have bunched branches in clusters hung low to the ground. The first snow started Friday in the afternoon & didn’t stop until late in the night the next day. I checked the streetlight, other side of my window & heavy curtain, about once an hour through the storm. Heavy storms like that sometimes you just look out. Arrested, wordless. It’s what you do.

The second snow started Tuesday & started with sleet drops and rain. I was walking back from Coffee Cat with someone we’d been writing some of the afternoon. The sky was grey in that ominous way the air has of making it seem bigger than the sky. A block from Hanson the first ice drop hit me & then the second, Did you feel that it’s starting I said too quickly & then felt silly bc it betrayed not really the panic but the extraordinary awe I secretly felt. I knew the next storm was going to be a big one. We were snaking our way along a foot path six inches wide in some sections & in some spots that ended in snow banks & put us back on to the street. He came in for dinner, we watched a movie then I sent him on his way bc my place is too small for a sleepover that might last more than one day.

It iced all night & I watched out my window as it changed to snow around 7am the next day. I was awed, but getting nervous, too. Ice on the lines is what brings them down I remember bc of 1999 & the power outages all over Anne Arundel, & three of my boys in the hospital after that, it was late night when I begged them not to drive home.

They called me witchy after the accident but had been doing that for years. It was just how my mom used to do, try to warn me off certain nights, then I’d end up in big trouble. I never listened to her & so it would piss me off like she’d jinxed or cursed me it took me years to get that it wasn’t a jinx just her gut feelings & so finally I started to listen to mine, too.

When the snow did start in the morning I’d been up for four hours already. I put a movie in & when that was over slept on the sofa most of the day. I was up from around 4 in the afternoon til midnight again but didn’t do anything except Facebook & sitcoms on TV. I feel deep asleep at midnight & woke this morning at 10 & could’ve kept going. Sleep felt so delicious to me then, so organic, like marrow to my bones. This elixir is what I’d been running from. I am still under the covers & soft sheets the sun is out some people are walking or shoveling. But this is the deep rest I knew I’ve needed & I hope my neighbors don’t mind that right now there is no place, none, that I want to go.

~~
What I'm listening to: Madeline