I wonder if all single people reach a point when their singleness, which they've sometimes relished on taking leave of a crowd, and savored out of a notion of personal freedom that married people seem to have sacrificed, intensifies into heart-ache again just like a lonely teenager's. We see we have to make some effort to re-adjust to the single state since temporarily we found we had family or a mate, and we might marvel we could feel this bereft in the age of instant wireless communication. Weather and scenery can heighten a feeling of abandonment by all others who used to demonstrate their care for us. If we love many people now and cherish others from our past, and anticipate reuniting with at least some of these favorite folk, we can hope the loneliness abates as naturally as the ebbing snows of this current, reassuringly traditional winter's lengthening days.
Driving this straight road across the miles of boreal bog all commingled with white over black needles I'm reminded of the 20th-century American writer Conrad Aiken's short story Silent Snow Secret Snow, which must have been included in several of my school English anthologies way back in the 1970s. Made into a movie as well, the story describes a boy losing awareness of his schoolmates and parents around him as imaginary snow fills itself in over floor and furniture in the classroom and in his home, till there is nothing he chooses to know but his enchantment with his surroundings all buried in white. The reader knows it's a disease process, the boy named Paul, aged twelve, fleeing a confrontation with the doctor and his parents to his bed where the snow fantasy can prevail with no adult intrusion. This morning I'm drawing on dim memory of snow majesty a little bit from that literary perspective.
I think I know from long ago the anticipation of snow as a protection and cloak that gave surrounding light a new splendor. When I was a child I'd hanker for snow weeks and months before we'd get any, and savored how it unified all the odd-colored, odd-textured surfaces outside the house, into the woods and pastures beyond us.
A white-out happened to me in early 2010 as I was returning from Ely, Minnesota to the Twin Cities via Two Harbors, where a squadron of long-tailed ducks had been reported by local birders. It took me little time using the spotting scope to zero in on the flock cavorting on Lake Superior's waves. The ducks were white-necked with dark patterning to their cheeks, dark wings sunken in white flanks, and black, ornamental tails spiking upward. Over the birds diving and bowing bill to bill in rituals of courtship moved the snow squall, swiftly denser and denser till every individual was erased just for a few minutes. They sounded like the voices of elderly women seized by hilarity, bearing witness to the former name 'oldsquaw', abandoned as derogatory, now replaced by 'long-tailed duck.' It seems to me that the flock was on the wing, crossing down-lake, as I left the scene marveling at how quickly a crisp sighting had faded into a mere listening-fest, the flock unperturbed in their blindness and still cackling.
It was my wish to express a sort of ultimate conviviality, given out by the ducks, upon a background of lostness and disintegration, a whole atmosphere of snow, vapor and seas.
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