Sunday, snowy Sunday

There's a postcard of a cactus under an Arizona rainbow on my desk this morning, and snow falling steadily past the window. The black dog who lives with us barks madly through the front window at anyone passing outside. Even though I've been reading a Paul Theroux essay in bed about the mental dangers of anthropomorphizing animals, I can't help but give her a little canine psychoanalysis and conclude that she must be uncertain where her yard ends today. The grass, the flowerbeds, sidewalk, driveway, street and neighbors' yards have all been robbed of their separate colors and textures and are now just one lumpy, uniform blankness.

Snow falls rarely in this valley. Waking to it is like finding a forgotten $20 bill in a desk drawer: the day suddenly contains an excuse for minor extravagance. When I walk to campus in the afternoon, snowmen dot the yards and a collection of children are busy building a huge snow slide in the middle of the elementary school's baseball diamond. Two elderly women in knit caps who are clearing their respective walks on either side of a quiet street set down their shovels as I pass and throw snowballs at me. They miss, and all three of us laugh.

"We've been taking potshots at all the pedestrians," one grey-haired commando informs me cheerfully.

Hours later, after the wind has shaken most of the snow out of the tree branches and the roads have turned to a geometric cipher of dirty slush and wet pavement, the sun goes down behind the snow-trimmed fir trees and the sky turns a brief pale rose. I hear my housemate and her boyfriend talking in the kitchen while they make BLTs. The whole house is thick with the comfortable scent of bacon and the sound of his laugh as he tells her about the day he spent skiing in the mountains.

"There was so much fresh powder that we took on much steeper stuff than we would normally," he says. "If you didn't like what was going on you could just sit down."

Some days, the world feels blessed by an unusual simplicity. Tomorrow, a Monday morning when the world resumes its normal speed, the snow that remains will be seen as a nuisance or an excuse. Elementary school kids hoping for the day off school won't agree with me here, but I feel there's something approaching perfection to be found in a snow-bound Sunday in a place where snow is rare and celebrated when it arrives.

Today a skier got a little braver. Today two women acted like children and made a stranger laugh. The city was full of a greater appreciation of the things we take for granted, like driving at normal speeds without sliding suddenly to the side of the road. Today little kids went sledding in the park while college kids had fights made out of weather and got wet and went back inside with smiles on their cold faces. Today our dog was the supreme territorial mistress of as much of the world as she could see. And today I woke early and lay in bed, watching snow falling through the cold air and feeling quietly amazed by how much one snowstorm can change, and how we never seem to remember any of it until the world blesses us again in this strange and beautiful way.

A good day.