The snow is coming, and in huge dumps from the skies. Already I can hear the sound of compacting snow underneath my boots.
Where are my boots?
It would be too early for the people to clear up the snow, with their raw muscles or fancy machines. It would dark, in the evening, and I would be walking on the snow, some sections of the sidewalk still untrod, on others I would just be following the footsteps of previous individuals testing the fresh crystals from the sky.
There were times when snow was still falling, by the huge flakes, onto my nose, my eye lashes. And maybe there was someone with me, whose eyelashes were also catching the snowflakes. Someone I wanted very much to be with and yet our small physical distance was deceptively hiding the gulf I felt between us.
It's always so quiet during or right after a blizzard, save the howling wind that sometimes accompany any blizzard or its aftermath. So quiet that the compacting of the snow makes the silence even more noticeable. And you can even hear the scraping sound between different parts of your jacket. And you look up and see Mother Nature busy shoveling snow from her porch in heaven down to earth as the snowflakes scatter quietly in the darkness except where the streetlamps were. The dark branches of the night slowly betray their forms by harboring white snowflakes on their shoulders.
In the snow sometimes you will see small holes made most likely by dogs walked by the makers of the footprints you're stepping in. I sometimes noticed a lot of things when whether I was alone or not. The difference was that when I was alone I thought about the person who would take away that aloneness.
But why would I be walking alone in the middle of the night?
Because it was better to enjoy the romance alone than not enjoy it at all. I remember there times when I just got out on my own and see what the blizzard's silence was like, to accompany that silence with the compacting of the snow with my small boots. And now, I sit here, in the relative warmth of my bed, anticipating the snow tomorrow, and wonder about this winter, wonder about the little details of snow, during and after a blizzard, and what would accompany me in my journey to experience another wintry life.
