Fragment

Standing on the sidewalk by the house, it is quiet. Each sound becomes significant--
the drip, slow and singular, of ice melting from the eaves, and the rumble of my brother's conversation seeping through the droughty kitchen window frames. Miles all around fade into a snowy white mist. I cannot make out the field's end. Near at hand, the yellow rose brier is encased in a fragile silver spell which I hardly see, watching, instead, the large black dog as he roots something nasty from the snow and crunches it.

City Snow

When we lived in town, my mother didn't care much for snow. I remember driving past embankments grass covered in summer but besmirched in winter with tire-flung slush. The traffic churned white powder into deep gray gunk, and the atmosphere assumed the unhealthy dankness of a cold in the head. When I turned thirteen, we moved to a village of 300 tucked in amongst miles of fields and timber. Suddenly, winter became a thing of peculiar glory--treacherous at times, and sharply beautiful. The sun flamed colored glitterings from individual crystals under the maple in front of our house, and the road beyond it retained a postcard purity even into the afternoon. Fields behind the house offered their own arctic wasteland, a chance for first footsteps onto the moon,an opportunity to tread where no one else had ever pressed his foot. Blue shadows rested beside drifts along the fence line, and the ditches sported wind sculptures like cake frosting or snow white peaks of meringue. On especially cold days, wraith veils of snow snaked across the road like the angel of death in the old Ten Commandments movie. An austere joy thrived in the miles and miles of relentless white.

I live in the city again. This morning, trudging to the post office through uncleared sidewalks next to four lanes of traffic, I noted gray spatters flung far across last night's snow and grimaced as droplets misted my face. My perennial struggle here is identifying myself with my brothers who live packed among human-induced problems in this over crowded part of earth. Never mind my own sins and struggles--I'd rather consider their problems as something alien imposed upon my quiet little country self. But if ankle-deep, sludgy snow is not my native turf, and if this is Christmas time, isn't this sort of walking a kind of privilege? Just think, our God chose to identify himself so completely with us that He became one of us, walking our roads as if they were natural for Him! A reminder of God's chosen closeness to us is worth dirty snow in my shoes.

"Your attitude should be the same as that of Christ Jesus: Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness" (Philippians 2:5-7, NIV).

Ode to an Old Car

How do I write a tribute to a car without being sappy?
Probably, I can't. But you were, after all, my first, and that must count for something. Also, the way you carried my soul around--that counts for something too: the hours and hours several times a semester gliding from Tennessee to Illinois and back again, and those last bittersweet voyages to Arkansas to say goodbye to a woman with a thousand wrinkle lines and the man who loved her, and the sweetly strange moment on the way back when it seemed God showed me what to do with all the love I had just seen. I glimpsed pink sunrises and red sunsets and mile after mile clocked while the heart recalibrated from one scene to another. I talked to God and I thought while your great metal capsule shuttled me through landscapes beyond the merely physical.

I brushed the caked snow off your rear windshield when I said goodbye, so that I could rub the raised outline of the duck head sticker pasted there by an elderly man I respected and loved--your first owner, the man who agreed with his family to give you to mine. I liked that sticker--liked the fact that my car didn't scream "vulnerable single woman" in this city world. I liked the way a Buick '92 was actually cool here. The tow guy was disappointed when he saw you. There wasn't much to salvage, so we renegotiated your price. But that's all right. You were worth a lot--just not that kind of currency.

Thanks.

I am haunted by the ice-edge of idyllic winter, the slip and shine of it, the beauty that can't be kept, the brilliance that is itself a splintering of light. What thin membranes hold life as we know it in place! How elusive the boundaries between the mundane and the profound--the Infant and stable and sword inextricably linked. There is much we cannot hold, and much--thank God!--we cannot hinder.