snow

What's that white crap on my car?  Snow hit us early and hard and I awoke to a crackling sound hitting my window. Wait, my sleeping brain postulated, this ain't soft lullaby rain falling, it has mass and weight and I will need to deal with it.
I took the George test. I scooped a quarter out of my coin purse and inserted it into the tread of my tire and the coin should have sunk down to to his eyebrow line but there it sat and I could see the whole bald pate.  I need new tires and soon if I am to scale the treacherous slippery-slidey bluffs of my hometown.

I choose to live in Iowa. My father is here and my daughter and some of my grandchildren so I have roots and more than enough reason to stay.  I visit warmer, dryer climates throughout the year but I always return to this unstable land and wait for the cold days knowing they complete me. I could not live in an endless summer.

When I was divorced and impoverished I drove a forest green Chevette, a midget's car and there was no front wheel drive or anti-lock brakes.  I needed traction and one year I filled the back of that car with chunks of cement I found near a construction site. Luckily, no other vehicle came racing towards me causing my foot to hit the brakes excessively hard and those chunks would have hurled themselves towards my tender neck.  The following year I bought eighty pounds of kitty litter for the hatchback to combat the ice and my father commented, "what do you have for a pet, a tiger?"

Snow fascinates me, its beauty and singularity, and as I age I long for and appreciate the silences of life, so few in these days of techno noise and endless motor rumblings.  A snowy country landscape shushes the clatter and creaking in  my brain, bring it on.