SNOW DAY, YEAR, AND LIFE

It's a snow day here in Colorado. Everything is shut down or slowed down and all of it is different. We can't navigate our lives as easily. Some of us are sleeping in. Some of us are up but don't know what to do with ourselves. Of course, there are always a few who pretend it's just another day, and trudge along through the drifts as if they don't exist. I watch them from my window and can't decide if they are crazy or stupid or from another planet. When I let my dog out back this morning, he made it all of three feet out before giving up.

It's a snow day. It's been a snow day for over a year, hasn't it?

And what made this one feel just like the past year is that somehow I didn't texted by my school to tell me it was closed today, so I got up at 6 am as usual, put on the coffee, put the dog out, listened to the morning flash briefing on my Alexa, and fully woke up. I think sometimes, when you wake up, you have this little window of time when you can decide to go back to sleep and you do, no harm no foul. But for me, once I've actually made a full French press of coffee, heard the weather report, and read at least part of an article on the NY Times app, there is no going back to sleep. So here I am. My wife and I work at the same school, and when I brought up the coffee, she was still sleeping. I nudged her awake, she told me to look at her phone. And there was the text she had gotten over an hour before, saying our school was closed today. Somehow, this miscommunication from a usually reliable source seems to fit in with the world we have been living in for over a year.

It's a snow year. But at least it does feel like the ice is melting, the Spring is coming, and things are getting better, albeit at a glacial pace. Gone is the sense of dread every time I see a headline that has the words "the White House" in them. It is of course still awful. Over 500,000 dead in America alone. Over 2.4 million worldwide. Or, to let the numbers look accurate, 2,400,000. I can't really wrap my head around numbers that large. I try to imagine how many people that is, how to make the number real. And I can't. It's like contemplating infinity. It just makes no sense to me. 

So I'm still in my PJs, drinking coffee, listening to a little classical mix in the den, shaking the cobwebs from my head as best I can, and wondering what comes next. I've got some writing to catch up on, a few screenplays and a new musical. I have a call I have to make about the sale of my mom's house out in California. And there are always plenty of projects to do around the house. But there are also tons of shows I've been wandering through on all those damn streaming services. Doom Patrol. WandaVision. Modern Family. Derry Girls. Not to mention my ever growing stack of books, some half read, some untouched. It's like the house is full of items and ideas in semi-suspended animation. 

Looks like we got over eight inches last night. I drove down from the mountains, where we were having a socially distanced rehearsal for a high school musical. The road was very twisty, covered in ice and snow, and it was coming down so hard and fast that it looked like when they go to hyper space in Star Wars. What usually takes half and hour took over an hour and a half. My car is a little Hyundai. No AWD or 4WD. The car slid more than once. And I passed several accidents. It was a little nerve wracking. But I made it. 

Maybe that's the metaphor I'm looking for this morning in regards to the snow and this past year. It's been terrifying, tedious, and frustrating, but for those of us still alive, we made it. We're tired, unsure of what today will bring, and in need of coffee. But we made it. 

Yay.

Here's a song. It's Snow Days, by Trip Shakespeare. Enjoy.