Good morning! Thank you for joining me today.
I can’t get through any New Year’s Eve without thinking of the night of December 31st, 1999. I was in high school. My parents were in the process of building their house, several miles outside city limits. There was a widespread fear that the world was going to descend into chaos when midnight hit. That the computers wouldn’t be able to handle it, and our financial and defense systems would go haywire. Some of my friends’ families were stockpiling canned goods. My father, who was a computer programmer, said it would all turn out to be no big deal.
He was right. But that night, to ring in the new year, we left the warmth of our noisy, moldy apartment in town and went instead to that quiet, concrete-and-sheetrock structure that was supposed to one day be a home. We sat on the bare brick hearth where the woodstove, which would one day keep us warm when the power went out in a blizzard, would eventually be installed. We watched the lights of the city twinkle from far away while the clock changed to midnight in the Central time zone. Others had entered the new year ahead of us; then it was our turn.
The next morning, there was a sort of collective shrugging-off of the Y2K fears, and we moved on to the next worry. Everyone went on with their lives.
But what I remember vividly about that night is the darkness of the sky through those clear new windows. The smell of drywall and cement. The cold and sparkling stars outside. How young I was. The muffled sound of the car doors closing when we arrived at the house. How strange it was to be one little warm alive spot in a massive, inexplicable universe. How blank and impersonal that house was then. Now, my parents have lived there for over two decades. So much has changed. Sometimes when I need re-centering, that night is what I think of— the night when nothing happened; the night before everything happened.
Today’s poem is about walking out into a freezing fog after a snowstorm. A life is made up of all these tiny moments, which we often don’t even notice. They’re happening right now.
Visibility* Nothing was the way it had been left. Overnight, ice had crystallized to the fields under the cold pulse of stars, and formed a gray light, so there wasn't a horizon line anymore, nothing to keep the frozen ground and sky apart. Clouds had gathered at eye level. The yard fell away from the windows in white billows, radiating from the house to vanish in a circle around it, as if ours was the only home left standing, and the road had disappeared. White bowed the power lines. From the back door, we could see tumbleweeds gripping the barbed wire fence, furry and expressionless as white spiders, and the wire had lost its edges. The new landscape was enough to draw us outside, where our feet were silent but our coats rustled. There were no voices. The horses walked out of a fog the way things do in dreams, their darkness rippling over the white ground, not belonging to anything. We went toward barren mesquite trees, their branches triumphant with frozen white blossoms, though spring would not bring flowers or even leaves anymore. We walked into our own breath, so far that the camera bumping my side and your glove-hidden hand were my only possessions. The field was a clean curve opening as we went, then closing behind us with so little ceremony we couldn't be blamed for not noticing.
If you’d like, please join me now for a moment of reflection.
Have you ever had a moment that suddenly made you see yourself in a different light? What was it?
Is there an experience in your youth you didn’t think much of at the time, but which you now remember vividly?
If you’d like to do so, please share your answers in the comments section for this post. I appreciate your choosing to spend some of your time with me.
Take good care of yourselves out there! I’ll see you next week.
*“Visibility” is included in the book The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City, published by Purple Flag Press in 2017.
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