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While people were deciding my band awards at the apartment tonight, I was sent outside for a few minutes. "You could go upstairs, you know," they told me, but I opted for the snow. After shuffling around for a bit and watching the way the light powder fluttered to the ground, I decided to make a picture in the snow. I walked in a big circle, then leaped inside it to make a smile. It wasn't long before Jesse came out to retrieve me. "Just a minute," I called, jumping twice more to make the eyes, then another time to get out of the circle. I wondered how long the smiley face would last before people walked through it or more snow came to cover it.
Walking across Whitnall back to our suite later on, Sara and I saw an unusual-looking set of tracks up ahead. "Is that writing?" I asked. As we got closer it became clear that it was, cursive writing enclosed in a large oval. We walked alongside it, reading each letter as we went along. "I love Elizabeth," it read. And much as I hate sappy displays, I couldn't help but think there was something special about the sentiment spelled out in the snow.
As I came down from the radio station tonight, a light snow was falling, the sparkly kind that I usually think of as useless, no good for packing or building with at all. On the stairs I had the urge to brush the snow off the railings with my bare hands, but the flakes glinted in the light and I looked more closely. Each flake stood out from the others and I could see the little individual patterns on each one. No two are exactly alike echoed in my head. Like people. I left the flakes alone then, and just gazed at them as I walked down the stairs.
They coated the ground, too, and somehow managed to glitter even in the mud where the road had been sanded. It dazzled my eyes, and suddenly the ground seemed to be moving, and I couldn't tell quite how far away it was. It was like the gigantic thunderstorm earlier in the semester, when I went outside to dance around in the rain and found myself soaked to the skin in thirty seconds flat. I decided that I had better run down to my room to get dry clothes before class, so with the rain still falling I raced down the hill, following the water in its course. There was so much water, and it moved so quickly, that at times I was convinced that the ground itself was moving and had to stand still to regain my balance. The rainwater needed to flow downhill to get that effect, but the snow, all it had to do was be there.
I think I'm learning lately that when I feel the outdoors calling to me, I should listen to it.
