Here in Colorado the snow can be just a light and dry as talc powder. Here in Colorado the sun is laser like and burns up any moisture under a ray. There are often days when the black roads will be steaming with snow melt and the temperature too cold to have the window open, even a crack. I was delighted to wake up and see 6-8 inches of snow stacked on every relief possible. Columns of snow sat atop every tiny branch and outlined every bark rise on the trunk of the deeply grooved cottonwoods. I simply had to go outside. My ski pants zupping as I walked, my boots leaving their paw tracks, I strolled on down to the park. Cross country skiers tracked loops around and runners sipped in the chilly air. I left the already plowed and salted pathway. The white stuff flew up around my footsteps, no crunch, no squeak, snow as foreign to me as mars. I spotted a hammock of low trees that when covered by snow created a cave. I crawled in and lay back, just enough room for me and maybe one other. I use the word hammock here because of a misinterpretation on my part. A friend in Florida once described a spot we were in as a hammock of live oak. I made the connection to a web of branches that so tightly knit together overhead that there was but a fraction of the hot sun reaching the ground. As if I was walking under the web of a hammock instead of lazily swaying upon one. Actually the word hammock is used regionally in the Southern US to refer to any hardwood forest or if you are on the coast, a little island in salt marsh that has red cedar, live oaks and saltbush growing on it. According to Florida Naturalist and zoology professor Archie Carr anyways. I like my definition better, so I will refer to this grouping of bushes that had grown together to form an above ground cave as my hammock. It cradled my body and gave me a sense of well being equal to the one I get in my well loved sleeping hammock.
I was not alone in here, I mean, I was the first to lay ground tracks on the space but I was not the only being here in this space. It was a space made more private with the snow chinking and I had not noticed the chickadee that now proclaimed first rights with its call. I made my peace offering by quieting myself, sinking my energy and spirit into the ground, being still. Her song became friendly again, the familiar chicka-dee-dee-dee trill most likely imperceptible outside of this snow blanket. My gaze enjoyed the blank canvas of white, my mind finding comfort in the uniformity. My world began to sparkle and I realized that the snow had begun to fall inside of my hammock. Even with it's minuscule weight, the bird bounced the snow off of the branches as it needled and explored the canopy. I was at the heart of a snow globe. what a gift from that creature who was merely going about it's business. Time becomes elastic in those moments of joy; the body however continues to cool and eventually I became aware that I had to get moving again. I rolled out of there extinguishing myself- when was the last time you rolled? My sister goaded me into rolling down the grassy sliding hill behind her house last year, we laughed like we were still the ages of my nieces who joined us but were much quicker to reach the bottom, drunk on youthful enthusiasm. It was snowing that day, a much different Northern Ontario snow. On this day, the snow didn't fall from the clouds, it began to fall from the trees. That famous Colorado sun, the one so "perfect" that it is used to define the standard known as one sun, came out and within second, the delicate white ledges began to topple off their perches. A second snow had begun. The entire park now a snow globe and I, grateful to be inside of it.
