Winters stand out in my memory far more vividly than summers do. If I were to ponder why, I'm sure the answer would relate to the abundant dark and indoor activities that make a girl like me feel like having fun, rather than feel the need to hide from the glowing hot ball of gas in the sky. Yesterday felt like autumn. Today feels like winter, and I like it. It's like one of those nights carved out of time that lives in my memory free-flowing, hard to pin down but cherished forever. It's coming home from a party with a college roommate during a blizzard, or playing Risk all night in a basement apartment with an inch of frost coming in all the windows, or better yet... it's spending a whole winter break with my high school friends, staying out way later than our parents ever let us do on school nights. That's what the whole day felt like.
We had part of the gang over yesterday evening, to catch up on the current season of Doctor Who, and then to play mah jongg once the sun went down. It felt way later than it really was, and before 9, everyone had gone home, and I was sitting in my bed, waiting for the snow to blow in. It showed up around 11. By 6 this morning, I woke while it was still full dark, and even if I hadn't know it was snowing, I would have been able to tell by the pink cast to the sky visible through the glass block window in my room. The streets never iced over, but there was ankle deep snow on the grass and it kept coming down all day, plus it was significantly colder than yesterday. We watched football next door, ate butternut squash soup, and played Nintendo games. It felt like a winter break from my teens or early twenties. That feeling intensified when my foster daughter and I ducked out to go through the McDonald's drive through for french fries, and it looked so dark and slick outside, that I could have sworn it was close to midnight, even though it was actually 7 or 8 o'clock. Technically today is a holiday, both Remembrance Day and Veterans Day, but at that moment it felt like it was also New Year's Eve and Thanksgiving Night and a citywide shutdown for an ice storm rolled in there for good luck.
I have been trying to remember ever since, which year it was that was intruding into my thoughts. Maybe sophomore, maybe junior year in high school. Snow didn't come through Oklahoma all that often, but we had a few inches of it coating the top of a thick layer of ice. School was out, and I had all the time in the world to hang out with the boys who were my best friends, the D&D group, the ones I went to the City (OKC) with, the ones I'd watch movies with. It was one of those nights, when we'd watched something like Mad Max, and still had time to kill before our teenage brains would let us power down and go to sleep. It was dark, and one of the guys had a big pickup truck and little regard for safety. I'm fairly certain I stayed in the cab of the truck while two or three of the boys stood behind it, hanging on to the tailgate, their feet firmly planted. The owner of the truck spun out the wheels on ice, pulling the others along, never lifting their shoes off the street. Decades later, I don't remember whether anyone actually fell, or did we just drag them at a speed they could handle? It probably wasn't the wisest activity, but on a timeless night where the snow and dark made the world magical, did we care?
No comments:
Post a Comment