snow day

It’s been raining every day for a month. Saturday afternoon, it started to snow. I forgot the cold, forgave the cloaks on still green leaves, the waxy tropic ovals without a Midwest chance. The home-from-campus bus that normally drags out sighs, claws patience, twists my spine into a hateful slump waste of time delivers a perfect thousand words from out the window every couple of feet.

As I walk the block and a half home from the stop, a man in short shorts, maybe his underpants, I didn’t ask, hails from across the street, “Merry Christmas!” Stepping light like a foal with stick, bare legs.

Two days later, the snow hasn’t stopped. On top of a never-ending boil water advisory, Vancouver’s got power outages crippling the university and half the city. I should be doing homework, the monster push to the end of the semester but attention turns again and again to the window.

Tried to call my mom but couldn’t connect her. Just want to listen to her talk and tell her about the weather. The Cities would’ve plowed the streets eighty times over. Here, they just marvel. For the past three hours a woman has been shoveling her driveway with the charmed smile calm of a tea ceremony, a West Coast dweller keen to claim her face-flush Canadian birthright you, hearty you! will shovel snow! and like it, with not a thing in the world would you replace it.

That last sentence trips up and I like it. I’ll let it.

Provided I survive the two weeks left of school, I’ll be home for the Holleday. December 8 or so I bus to Seattle for a couple days then fly to Minneapolis for a few more, surfing couches and hugging hard and haunting haunts and possibly pledging allegiance to the Target Corporation, certainly skip-squealing joyously down aisles of Stuff in predicable locations and twelve different kinds, choice cheap as hell and kind of disgusting but notably missed.

I wanna eat at Qwang’s! An effin Jimmy John’s! The Jasmine Cafe and Wienery, Triple Rock, New Delhi! I will then make my way to Fargo, somehow, doesn’t matter. Coerce my dad to help me make a late Thanksgiving dinner, tofurkey and cranberries and punkin pie. Trim a couple trees and try to impart Life to high school brothers without sounding sageless, out of touch and too late, we’re all grown up. We know everything. Read, write, laze, relax, maybe stab at some updated d6 content—we’ll see. I’ve gotten bad with promising.

Stay warm, stay cool and get in touch if you want to make friendship happen in real time. For those of you who have no choice… I’ll see you soon.