So Much Depends Upon

We used to get more snow. Enough to slide down my aunt and uncle’s big hill. Enough to make you think twice about getting on the road. Enough to form a teenage emergency vehicle recovery crew at the curve before the tunnel at the other end of Hurricane Creek road where another aunt and uncle lived to push people out of the ditch there. We’d stay at their house for days sometimes, young people in every room, on every cushioned surface (and the floor) because school was closed and we liked being around each other. It was simple and good. Maybe someone would drag a car hood full of kids behind a four-wheeler. Snow cream was a given. Soaked coveralls, tan pairs and green, both with red lining, would be stacked up at the back door by the wood stove making a combination smell that stays with me even now.

It was simple and good. Now, we just get dustings of snow, not enough to pack into a ball to or to put down the back of someone’s coat. We get ice.

But this year (2021) we got several (4-6) inches of snow, and the ground was nearly unrecognizable. It fell over the course of a few days. When I’d take the dog out in the morning, an unbelievable softness covered the ground. It looked like fog’s quilted cousin, and in a way I guess it is. I wished I could float so I wouldn’t break it.

I hadn’t seen color like that on the ground in a very long time. Not iridescent, really, but like a silk tie viewed from the side. Sometimes lighter, sometimes a bit darker with the transition between the two perfectly smooth and untraceable. What really stuck out to me was the way the tracks - they seemed to glow as if they had a light all their own. I was transfixed. Yes, as the light changed throughout the day the tracks would change also, but in the soft overcast light of morning and evening, the look of them and the velvet ground they were pressed into made me long to keep them around somehow. Frozen grasses and twigs from the pecan tree are known from the obscured dark shapes they make under the snow, like fish coming up from deeper waters, while a few blades, 6 inches or better, stick out from the surface, dark against the snow.

The velvet ground, the mystical tracks - an old house, dormant hydrangea, and the quiet morning.

Cats had been through in the night. Silent. Their perfect prints - little rounded stamps - contrasted clearly with my dog’s sloppy, dragged, furry-footed stride. One cat had hugged the old house headed past the bricked up opening under the house toward the corner with the hydrangea and then kept hugging the house as it made the turn. Another cat had angled to the corner hydrangea from another direction.

Were they together? Did they know one another? What did they look like? Do they stay in this area mostly? Was the hydrangea like a corner street light? My dog’s Dr. Suess feet striated the snow as he went to investigate. Hydrangea, old house, bricks, smelling, smelling.

How we all pass the same things every single day and never know them or each other. The cats had their own motivations, their own paths, my dog senses only what they left behind. Paths cross, but at different times, so they never meet. People waiting to cross the street or dining just a few tables apart. Something like secrets. Like the breeze of something passing, turning to see what made it, but nothing. Each one never knows the life of the other. Each one only knows the silent hydrangea and the walls they skirt. Those walls also once sheltered the body of my wife’s kin, and helped keep him warm and dry. They contain a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, and a closet. There is a newer metal roof. The blinds are closed on the windows. No one visits anymore.

Except cats and dogs and the one holding the leash, standing by a hydrangea that was planted by another family member now long gone back when the small house was full of warmth and life and cigarette smoke and all the messiness that family is.

I hold the leash. My dog, black and hairy, is so happy for the snow, but we must go in. It will be here for a couple more days. We will come back. We will all come back.

This is a poor depiction of the painting, but it is the best I could do. I hope to improve my ability to accurately photograph paintings.