Night shift

It snowed again last night. Only it was too cold to behave like snow but instead became a dusty foamy covering over this part of earth, over the deep, thick old snow already down and never melting. The sun had just started to pale the gray sky when I got to my car on top of the parking garage and dusted the flakes off the windshield. They were like those nasty mashed potato flakes to which one may just add water. They were too cold to know they had fallen and should lose their shape and join together, but held each crook and point and perfect flat shiny side with a quiet dignity and pride. I felt like I was killing them, breaking them with the brushing of my arms.

Moments later I drove down the salty highway. The sun became a deep dark bright orange sliver peeking through the mean black trees that climbed out of the giant bluish white pillow of the world. There was a dingy 18-wheeler in front of me, bouncing over the ice and muck. It had once perhaps been white, but now was a smeary stony brown-and-gray from salt and sand and mud-caked coldness. The truck, I noticed, was casting a breeze to its sides, and the breeze made whirling dervishes of the petite pieces of snow. When I looked closer, the sunlight with all its baby shades on the sky was catching the polished sides of the flakes, making each dervish a swirl of infinitesimal disco glitter from which I could not avert my eyes - turquoise, peach, white, dark pink, silver, pale blue, gone. One after another whipped up cheerfully, slowed as it turned like a glinting peacock and then was gone in a wisp of dry air. The snow's glow and the dervishes' glitz suddenly appeared to me like this: if Lisa Frank and Thomas Kincaid had gotten together and had a baby, that baby was this morning and this morning was mine. My eyes felt like they could taste it, and it tasted soft. And I knew I was tired.