Tuesday, March 01, 2005

Snow

It's been snowing all day. For the most part, we here in Tennessee have thought it the usual mockery of our wishes for school, work, and general routines to be cancelled (since they never are in Knox County or at Carson Newman, so it seems). As for me, it wasn't completely what I usually think of as a good snow, since it's March, which to me, signifies sandals, jeans, and a t-shirt. This snow also didn't have that gentle quiet about it. That sound that muffles all other sounds and is like no other - the sound of snowflakes landing on ice-dusted spruces. The weather that keeps people quiet. The simple hiss of ten-thousand little worlds of ice collecting in piles - they seem to erase all that previously existed, as if the world was truly supposed to look like that - hushed and smilingly pensive.

I like weather that makes other people want to stay inside. It's like a cover charge - it keeps out the riff-raff. The sky and her falling children have so much personality, and it's a great deal more evident when the rain drips slowly off the front of my tweed cap. It's been difficult to find a quiet place today, and I hope to find one tomorrow in the mountains between Tennessee and Carolina. I would love to bundle up and just walk somewhere for a while, unaware of human existence.

Kat and I have a somewhat crude but funny expression that we use with each other. When one of us is tired of being around others because we've been around them all day, we say we're constipated with people, or with whoever that specific person may be. I really enjoy Kat's company, because - as she said so poignantly - I can be alone and be with her at the same time. I don't feel like I'm constantly trying to drain myself to be around her. I can't help but be grateful when I think of a Love that I will soon enough know fully. A Love that makes this old busted goblet run refreshingly over the rim. I long for that day, when I will see His face and be filled - that day when I will have enough - when snow will always fall and it will always be quiet and the sounds of trains will call from the distance and jazz will meander in from the next room. The air will smell of clean and cold.

I used to think that, since hell was supposed to be hot, heaven must be cold. It always made me wonder about that, since people don't want to spend eternity freezing their butts off. But I love cold weather, it does make me feel clean. I breath in the chill, and it rinses me off and wrings me out like nothing else. It's closer to enough than many things that I enjoy. We seem to thrive on longing though - that yearning for this alien thing called enough. That prime rib that I put in my mouth makes me close my eyes and slowly shake my head, letting it melt me like wax - but I shake my head because, even as I enjoy one bite, I long for the next. That breath of honeysuckle on the elusive late June wind - I drink it in, like a greedy liquor I fill myself with it, but I ever pine for the next breath of it. Nothing is enough in this world. We thrive on yearning, as we are made to do, and it's beyond me to truly imagine the feeling of really having enough. But the longing is sweet on this Earth, and Love is quiet and cool on my face. My flesh hungers to be destroyed by this Enough. The snow is quiet, and the sounds of trains are in the distance.

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