Snow Day

I dread the dawn, and yet I cannot wait…literally, I can not wait—I went out a while ago with a flashlight to look at the ice sculptures. I’ve been amazed at tornado devastation and I’ve been belittled by sweltering heat waves. Living in Kansas, I’ve experienced most of weather’s wonders. None, however, are as marvelocious as the results of an ice storm. At once both beautiful and (for trees and travelers) deadly, these ice storms we’ve had at about 3 year intervals are quite the phenomena. I have hundreds of photos of ice art, and yet I’ve logged hundreds of hours picking up downed branches and helping people displaced by power outages. There’s little else in life so simultaneously malawesome, vileutiful, and grimorgeous. (Wordsmiths help me, I cannot quite peg this. There must be a word, or we must make one, that can embrace these extremes.)

I brace for how many branches will break.

Snow days are like February 29th or that mysteriously precious hour somewhere between springing forward and falling back. I am at once grateful, yet also adrift as if the atomic clock stopped tomming. The stark white reality of a whole day off, unexpected and uncharted, pinpricks my pupils—I squint at the awe of it. Like the blank page, it is yet unwritten, unspoken, un-done…in some ways overwhelming and yet there’s a just-rightness to it, too.

A day of grace. I am the condemned man, set to smolder in the electric chair, sated from my last hearty meal, smiling when the power goes out. I am the terminally ill patient who sloughs off my bedclothes for one more dance. I am the teacher who now can sleep, for I don’t have to make deadline to return 40 essays at dawn. (Whew)