The world, recently bare and winter drab, is white again. Snow lies like seven-minute frosting on everything in great swirls, curling into eaves and porch corners and insinuating itself into the cracks around doors and windows. Blue jays sweep the snow aside with their beaks, desperate for a bit of corn or some other bit of nourishment that not only wards off starvation but also supplies them with the body heat they need to survive in this type of weather. Everywhere within eyeshot, the ground, only recently revealed from beneath a previous snowfall, is obliterated again in honor of winter’s caprices.
From my window, the pond and its surroundings are just other parts of the greater white whole, the only markers of its existence are the tall weeds that protrude from its snowy banks and the gray trunks of trees leaning into the wind. And the storm rages on, buffeting the tops of pines, setting them to swaying to a beat that comes to me only as one interminable sigh. The snow flies, first up, then down, then sideways and back again, a maelstrom, a funnel into which all of life is pulled and where it will wait until the fury has spent itself.
The weather, that force that fascinates and that has the exclusive ability to stop us dead in our tracks, sometimes literally, reminds us from time to time of truths that, despite our best efforts and intentions, cannot be denied or controlled. We honor this terrible power in the only way we can, by paying it its due, by not turning away from it for a single moment, for fear that it will spring something new and even more terrible upon us. We are glued to televised weather reports and instant updates. We check back often for new developments, because who among us can deny our obsession with needing to know what will happen before it does? In what other area of our lives is that even possible? In most other instances, we play waiting games during which we are never sure of outcomes. And in most of those instances, there is no indication of what the outcome will be, no forecast, no premonition, so we wait ”¦ for news of a cure, or a financial windfall or a verdict. Where the weather is concerned, we know, or at least we think we do, what the outcome will be; and we collectively disregard the sizable incomes paid to those who are the most entertainingly efficient at convincing us that they do.
With the weather, we are told every second of every day what it will be at any given moment. The most current information is ever at our fingertips, and we make use of it more so now than we ever did at any other time in the past. More often than not, weather predictions are relatively accurate, give or take the occasional major misreading of all the data or nature’s way of pulling the rug out from under us without warning. What does our avid participation in all of this say about us? That at least with the weather, we do have some measure of control, if not over the process itself, then simply by having some idea of how it will all turn out. And that if things get bad enough, we have no choice but to turn away from our individual distractions and practice some good old-fashioned neighborliness.
For the weather affects us all, no matter how much we like to deny our direct involvement in it or how often we bemoan the constant barrage of information that assaults us daily. It is, in a sense, the next great leveler, for no matter where in the socio-economic puzzle we all fit, a roof blown off by the wind creates a hardship no matter whose building it blew off from, and rivers don’t care whose living rooms they are flooding.
The storm has passed, though the wind is still quite strong in the treetops and continues to stir the snow across the pond. I’ve put in a strenuous hour of shoveling, and now it’s time for a cool-down and to allow my adrenaline supply to replenish itself at the source. Bands of bright sky appear toward the south, and the sun is a pale, blue disk straining through what’s left of the snow clouds. Once again, nature spoke loud and clear, and once again, we had no choice but to listen and agree with whatever she had to say.
— Rachel Lovejoy, a freelance writer living in Lyman, who enjoys exploring the woods of southern Maine, can be reached via email at rachell1950@yahoo.com.
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