smelling the coming snow

from smelling the snow (3)

Ignoring the spring day and paying attention to the cold, she knew one thing for sure as she headed home, it was a good day for soup. This was the blessing winter brought. She could go out to the porch nights after he died and find comfort there.  The cold was a cushion.  It had become a comfort ever since her mother died in the stinking heat of Florida.  She’d sometimes acknowledge the burden of death and stink she’d put on Florida for the sake of original Floridians.  But it felt right to say the ‘stinking heat of Florida.’

~

     Cold just seemed a natural solace after her mother died.  Movies with snow in them the best kind of entertainment.  People complaining about the cold, suspicious. It wasn’t anything special to feel the snow coming the way she could.  A lot of people could feel that. There are telltale signs. The brain gets a signal and a feeling settles someplace in your body, holding out for the satisfaction the first sight of the snowfall brings.

     One particular night there was the telltale quiet before the snow.  Mrs. Scattergood went out to be at one with the cold and think about Barry.  She began to have a very odd feeling as if something was trying to peek through her consciousness. Then she realized what was going on.  She could smell the snow coming. Was this her animal self? It took her whole long life to know she had this ability. But then, she thought, everything takes your whole long life to know.  Damn the chronology of things.  So she stood there waiting for it, knowing it was a certainty and wondering what other senses she’d had but didn’t know she did.  Could she reach across the country to the wilderness? She wanted to go to the borders of those areas of the country she only saw in places like the Sierra Club magazine. She didn’t want to step into them. It is enough to read about those places, she thought.  Eco-tourism.  Another way to lose the land to people.  Maybe it is enough to smell the snow.  In time, she joked to herself, she will be able to smell the bird sanctuaries, the cathedral cliffs, the long stretches of red rock, mile long shadows swollen with the evening coming on. She could create a whole new field of nature writing, olfactory geography, and put an end to her envy of every nature writer she ever read.

~

     When she was younger she wanted to save the oceans. Her mother’s friend called Jacque Cousteau her friend because she had talked about him so much before his television special The Silent World of Jacque Cousteau aired. That’s when everyone knew who he was. Before that, he was her invisible friend.

~

     She knew about pollution when the word had meaning.  It’s so common now that we don’t feel its sting.  She loved the ocean. Saving it seemed like something she could help to do. As if you could reach in and pull out the muck.  Once she realized that every life was connected, every system and every stream, she also realized that she didn’t know how to clean the oceans, she didn’t know how to reach in either. Not yet.  She would find her ways.

Except from riding the waves:  a tale about being home in the world by freda karpf