Brain Gas about snow

It’s snowing here, as I am sure that it is in Knoxville. This time it’s sticking immediately to everything. It’s nice to be up here for this. The last storm had me holed-up in Knoxville as 10” made the cabin unreachable. As much snow as I’ve seen in my life in TN, I’ll never forget the snows in NY. The instant you woke up you could almost guess the depth of the snow outside by the level of sound coming into your apartment. I remember a few times where I awoke to utter silence. Luckily, silence and me get along just fine. However, I knew a number of people in NY that could not stand the lack of sound. To them, silence was the most frightening thing they could think of. To me, an 8”+ snow in NY was the most amazing thing I’d ever witnessed with the exception of the Aurora in Iceland. To see such an active and cacophonous city brought to utter silence, even for an hour or so, is simply unimaginably beautiful to me. Of course, this wears off when you have to pay for this beauty with three days of grey water slush infesting the streets and the almost abrupt reinstatement of sound back into your brain.

But for those few moments, I understood that magic could exist even in such a turbulent and complicated place as Manhattan. It was also one of the few times you could walk the sidewalks and not see a single person or sign of life for blocks on end. I used to imagine in these times that Manhattan was all mine, and it felt wonderful. I imagined hiking to the New York Public Library and sitting reading for days on end in front of a fireplace, guarded by the lions out front from whatever might lie in that silence with me. Of course this would be a perfect place where the electricity never went out and there was always something to eat. It was as though I went out of phase with everyone, living in a half place between reality and fantasy. Then again that’s precisely where I think I live half of the time anyway.