tonight the weather's working.

i can see the flakes just past the light, ghostly bright. the wind all push: more snow to come, more ice, more cold. something arctic is upon us, and it's strange.

listening to it all reminds me of wyoming, of the second story bedroom in a storm off open plains thrown down the mouth of laramie valley. the dark wasn't dark but orange, really; that's how i've always told snow. a glow in the sky like the lights of town but the clouds and behind them a new pulsing organ.

as a child, snow was only special. we were lucky to get it and lose a day of school, two if we could manage, if the weather was on our side. we'd roll whiteness to balls to roll bigger, into bodies, into towers. we'd pull sleds down silent streets to find any hill to ride down.

wyoming made snow commonplace, and, i suppose, minnesota before that. massachusetts first of all. when i could i moved to places whose winters meant more than endless rain. it wasn't intentional, but happened. green was an option for coats or boots or tights. not the color of things still alive, drawing life to their hearts and spreading slow and gentle as an unalarmed octopus.

this storm feels more like a storm than anything i've been in for years. more than the blizzard of last christmas in laramie when the roads shut down and we were prisoners of our valley. we made do. we skied. we built fires and baked and slippered around the house and snuggled all we could.

this storm feels more than the storm that dumped and dumped until our shoveling made chest-high walls along sidewalks and driveways, looming over toddlers, blinding in the sun.

more than the storms that set my alarm to wake me every three hours through the night to take the stairs into subzero twin-cityscape and pray my car would turn again, its engine breathe and motor roll. boxes of fish at the airport awaited my claiming, to pack them in the truck, deliver them back to the shop where the rest of the crew would be by 5:30, barely awake, dragging boots, wielding knives and sloshing hot water and bleach far better than anything their mouths could make to translate heads and what sat in them.

all this to mean what? that it's a little thrilling out here, up here, on the top story with the old oaks creaking and the flakes smacking windows. i don't know if the kids across the road have any idea, and i wish i could see them find it. watch the amazement, pinch a little of that joy to keep with myself as i sit in the morning at this window again, looking out on who knows what - a winter wonderland, a sludgy slop, a rink of ice and gravel and crystalline leaves. here comes the train, a slug in the dark, spreading the nearby field with light in its turn, announcing itself past our windows that we've darkened to watch something we've seen a hundred times be made beautifully new.