Signal Days

At length the winter set in in good earnest, just as I had finished plastering, and the wind began to howl around the house as if it had not had permission to do so till then. Thoreau, Walden, “House-Warming”

On my way out from the valley of no reception, on the season’s coldest morning thus far, I stop by the lake to pick up messages before a day of driving and appointments. My small screen shows no cancellations and no further national tectonics, so I close it and look out over the big screen and the lake, which writhes like a restless dragon.

I step from the car, and a soundtrack of muddled roar emphasizes its everywhere. The wind drives waves of slush ashore where they rattle like cobblestones as they draw their ice back toward the water.

The air coursing over it from the northwest is well below zero, but the water, roiled with waves, is still open, and a constant exhalation of steam flies in many shapes above it. This steam is a water-story too fast, too extreme for telling; writing it would be sentences full of transitions, with few stable nouns in between. Even as it will end in a single mass of ice.

To the east, the sun has topped the ridge, and its brilliance, the way it whitens the steam as it twists and spins, makes it colder still. I feel myself leak away with the wind and roar. Winter is howling in; it has “permission to do so.”

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