SNOWGLOBE

The other day it was snowing and blowing fiercely, the new snow already stacked up several inches atop the old, and Echo had to go into the city and do a couple other things on the way, but because of the snow and threats of bigger snow later in the day, she decided to take the train rather than drive, so I drove her to the next big station, three stations down the line.

About halfway there, as though god had snapped her fingers we emerged from heavy snowfall into a land of blue skies and tweeting birds, people were walking here and there unhunched, wearing shorts and flip-flops or sunbathing-- ok I'm exaggerating a bit but that's how it felt in the mind, the sudden transition from Yukon to Miami. The weather had just broken into tiny pieces of winter that melted on the road behind us. Long live the summer.

Later, on my way back home in the birdsong sunshine, about halfway there I saw not far ahead a roiling white carpet hanging from the sky, a pale wall into which the world and its road disappeared. Winter was right where we had driven out of it a half hour before, it had not moved or weakened, it was waiting, the great wall of white, hanging there like a veil before another world, the gateway to Snow Country.

I rolled up the windows and wished I hadn't hallucinated into shorts and flip-flops. I hit the big drift and the bright world disappeared, I could see maybe 2 meters to any side in the multicurrents of the snowstream, drove slowly back to our village and up the mountain a teeny-tiny person in a teeny-tiny red car at the heart of the way-biggest snow globe I'd ever been in.