Musical Flakes

Snow and snow and snow and snow. It’s snows all day, high up here along Shuford Creek. And still, by midnight, the roads are barely kissed with white. The flakes are small and featherweight, floating in a pitter-patter orchestra of distant sound. The grass and gravel can hold the snow. Car windshields. Dips in the hillsides.

I cannot help but turn my gaze westward, up, up, up the slopes of the Blacks to the place in the sky where I guess, through the darkness, the summit of Gibbs Mountain is. Along the ridgeline, in the deepest gullies, down the drainages, up there – the snow will stick.

Wind whistles down such drainages, treetop melodies sent from the peaks to accompany the snow orchestra below. Each flake like a musical note turned loose from the page, free from bars and scores, from scales and triplets, rippling through the air at breakneck speed. No wonder the flakes don’t seem to land. I don’t think I would either.

And yet – there is a tinking sound, like champagne glasses from across the room or Cinderella’s glass slippers crossing ballroom dance floors from fairy tale land. The snow seems to collide midair, then sometimes land with a tink, before skidding across pavement and rockslick and rhodi leaves. Never stopping. Ever-frozen. Like the memory of one night in all of time.