Editorial
Front Page - Friday, December 31, 2010
Are we there yet?
At last it snowed
Jay Edwards
(yeah it’s a rerun – too much Christmas cheer)
…because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.
– Paul Bowles,
The Sheltering Sky
Things change when it snows. For one thing, people act differently. Perhaps it is that inner child coming out that we are all supposed to have, or maybe it is just having something different in our lives that the familiar white layer brings when it covers up more than just earth and rooftops.
People’s driving changes too. Usually it takes me around 20 minutes to get downtown from my home off of Pebble Beach in West Little Rock. In Tuesday’s great snowfall of 2008, it took me 45 minutes.
Kathy sat beside me as I drove, seemingly content to sing along with the tunes on Tom 106.7, the new station led by, and I guess named after longtime Little Rock radio veteran Tom Wood.
Her contentment wasn’t contagious though, and after finally enduring all I could of the snails pace on 630, and becoming almost physically ill from unceasing view of the dirty red Chevy van I had been drafting forever in the fast lane, I made my best Mark Martin move, gunning the Honda’s powerful four cylinders up to 12 mph, and darting across the two lanes to the exit at Fair Park. The road less traveled.
When we crossed the overpass I could see the cause of the slowdown, the solitary blue lights a half-mile or so to the east, which stood out through the red lights of the hundreds of frustrated brakers who had stayed the course.
We passed between the zoo and War Memorial Park as Kathy karaokied another song from the seventies. I spotted two young people walking through the snowy fairways to our left, taking their time, unaware or unconcerned that the Little Rock Schools had chosen to open for business.
Watching them brought a memory out of hiding.
It was of a snowy day from a decade ago, when I walked with my daughter Alexis, down a large path in some woods near our house in Fayetteville.
It was one of those days, moments really, that came as close to perfection as something can; I even remember thinking it at the time.
One of those days when the snow and its cold quiet seemed to cleanse everything, presenting nature at its best.
We were walking through what would soon become an extension of the neighborhood we lived in, but on that day the snow had covered any traces of developers, and we could have just as easily been somewhere in the middle of the Ozarks, miles from civilization.
Alexis ran ahead, thrilled to be out of school and surrounded by white, yelling for me to come and see something, anything really, that had been transformed from ordinary to wonderful through the magic of snow.
We walked on a bit farther and the roof of a house appeared above the tree line, smoke rising from its brick chimney. Alexis ran around a corner of trees, just out of sight.
I found her near a small hill that we slid down until the sky began to darken, which I took as a sign to head towards home.
Ten years later Kathy and I are back in Little Rock, and Alexis is back in Fayetteville, midway through her sophomore year. I called her on Tuesday morning after learning the U of A had cancelled classes that day, and after remembering that day we had played in the snow.
We talked briefly, mostly about the weather, and I succeeded in keeping her on the phone long enough to hear her laugh.
Later that evening, I walked through the woods behind my house where I was glad to see traces of the year’s only snowfall still laying in the shade.
I turned a corner and again remembered the day with Alexis, and her snowball hitting me in the leg, causing her to laugh and run away. I remembered taking off my gloves and bending down to make a snowball of my own as she kept running through the snow and the trees, thrilled at being chased and all the while laughing the laugh of a child, which echoed through the quiet around us, before landing at its proper place in my memory, where it lives forever.
|
|