Good morning, good snow, sleet, ice laden morning here in Massachusetts. And, from what I understand, also the case, increasingly rare, in New York City, in fact more of these elements there this morning than here in northern Massachusetts abutting the New Hampshire border.
I am a person who goes to church on Sunday morning. I go to an early service (9:00am) and to church in a town 15 miles from where I live, so, especially in the winter, I need to drive if I want to get there reasonably timely. I also go to get there an hour ahead, because I treat myself to coffee and a chocolate cookie each Sunday morning. (Most other mornings it is coffee, always coffee, and oatmeal with yogurt, raisins, and blueberries, prepared and consumed at home.)
I am also a person who, as you may already know, would rather not to have to drive to reach a destination. Walking or bicycling is preferred. Public transit is a third option, which I enjoy taking in part because it is the mode motorized mode I am most familiar with since childhood. In part I can enjoy it even more now than when I was working, because generally I do not have to worry about office hours…
So, this morning in the dim early light, quiet early Sunday hush, I stepped carefully outside and small-stepped in my gripless “dress” boots (knee high, remarkably warm, but with smooth leather bottoms) to my car, and brushed off the fraction of an inch of snow that had so far accumulated. I got in, started, and cautiously drove the small streets leading to the highway. I notice the city has begun laying out the night before that liquid whatever other local municipalities have been using to keep the snow from sticking to the road surface. Is it ecologically non-damaging? I am guessing it is at least less damaging than the chemicals that populate so many of the options on sale for keeping one’s sidewalks and roadways unslippery. I’ll research that later.
I drove up the access ramp to the highway. Nicely empty on Sunday anyway, especially so on this morning of not so good driving conditions. I drove a couple of miles and began to not like the condition of the precipitation. It seemed to be shifting from snow to sleet and ice. I said to myself, turn around. I passed one exit. I said, get off at the next, but myself said no, I’ll tough it out. I passed that next exit, and then the empty road was suddenly not, and the many cars ahead of me and the growing number behind and beside me were finding they had to come to a slowdown and stay at snail’s pace. Nope, I said to myself, I will get off at the next exit, this is too slow, and just what is happening over that rise that we are at this accumulation of vehicles crawling? So, reader, I did! I got off, I did not reverse on the highway, rather, drove easterly a bit and drove back home via local roads in the two towns I had to traverse by this point to get back to my city of dwelling.
So, you probably think something dramatic is in the offing, why else would I describe a snowy drive so minutely? There is nothing to report. I got home and, perhaps this is the drama, I made myself a bowl of oatmeal to be accompanied by coffee instead of treating myself to a chocolate chip cookie and coffee. I, because one can these days (and have been readily able to for, what five or six years now?), “live-streamed” the sermon–it was good, very good; it was a Christmas season sermon and was about expectations and what shapes one’s expectations. It took the very human, at the time very young, soon to be mother of Jesus as its central point-making protagonist, and it made a message to ponder (germ of it is in Luke 1). I am glad I watched it. Because in my self-talk all the way back home I included consideration of maybe I just won’t watch, maybe I’ll just read, or sit and watch the snow cap the crests of cardinals and blue jays, and crown the brilliant red of the red-bellied woodpecker who has lately been living in my backyard, and the downy woodpeckers, and the juncos, and the nuthatch, the chickadees, the doves, the many, many sparrows.
As it turned out, I did all of the above, because it is quite possible in my house to eat breakfast, drink coffee, livestream the sermon, and watch the alternately squabbling, alternately sharing songbirds at one and the same time.
What is this all about? Perhaps about the continuity of life, however it sings, or groans, or hurts, hinders, or walks, struts, dances. Perhaps about the persistence of hope even in the face of my own mistakes, my own erroneous decisions, my own consistent failure to trust the hope. Do I distrust the object of the hope or the source of the hope? In other words, do I distrust because I do not have faith that my hope has sufficient grounding? sufficient reason for being? sufficient trust in the object, or sufficient trust in my urge to hope that?
What, in other other words, am I expecting? Or, in other, other words, who? In who am I hoping?
Back to walking vs. driving. Do it! Do it whenever you can. I advise this, yet as I do, I know there are many, including among you who finding walking difficult, or for whom it has become, actually, impossible. Walk in your mind. Slowly, eyes open, senses alert, hope at the ready. It is like breathing.
From Emily Dickinson–It sifts from Leaden sieves
It sifts from Leaden Sieves –
It powders all the Wood.
It fills with Alabaster Wool –
The Wrinkles of the Road –
It makes an even Face
Of Mountain, and of Plain –
whereIwonder&why 