Friday, March 02, 2018

float

I have dreamed of levitating since I was a child. Flying down the stairs. Jumping out of windows into flight. And now, more recently, the effortless scooping of air with my hands to set me aloft. The part I love is how easy it is, as if floating in the sky is the most natural thing for human beings, countless souls surveying the earth from above, carefree.

The quiet is deafening with the snow on the ground. A few birds, perhaps, one or two muffled cars, but just the soundless white spread around into little drifts, cold, hard powder mounds. And smell is gone too. The dogs dig into the ground for things that smell, and linger on barbed wire fences with just the faintest sign of a fox - a feather. Just the crunch of boots on powder remains, white lines on the side of trees, frosted holly.

We have this weather because the north pole has been weakened and the vortex which keeps its blizzard and ice to itself has been compromised, so the cold escapes and comes to Europe for a holiday. Frozen rain, icy wind, freezing faces.

My neighbors have a permanently laid dining room table. I pretend I don't stare in through the windows every time I go past, but I do. I wonder who they are waiting for. A lone white rocking horse stares out from the window above. If it sounds fanciful, it's not. This is what I observe.

Yesterday we brought branches in. We need signs of the spring, and budding hazel and silver birch might help. My mother tells me that as a child in Tønsberg, she brought silver birch into the kitchen and put it in the window in a vase packed with snow.

The north wind blows through the chimney in our quiet house. The exterminator man has made sure that the band the glis glis were putting together won't play. No more scratching or running through the walls and ceiling, no more delighted hi-jinx, just the mournful wind.

I love the few moments between sleeping and waking when you can't remember if your dream was real or not, and it doesn't matter. For a few minutes, you were floating on air, completely sure that the whole world was inside you.

1 comment:

LPC said...

Life is lit by what we dream and what we observe, everything else is kind of a smudge.