It’s five o’clock on a January afternoon. We’re expecting snow, and you can feel it. Just like when you can feel the onset of rain in Texas on a spring afternoon, the humidity is right, the light is right. In OH, you can see and feel that the clouds are heavy with snow. Instead of vertiginous wisps of excitable moisture, they form a flat gray sheet stretched tightly from horizon to horizon like a trampoline. Above it, the snow just sits waiting. We’re expecting snow.
Iron trunks with thorny branches are all that remain of Autumn’s fiery reds, burnt oranges, and penetrating yellows. Now, trees stick pointedly out of stale crunchy snow as if some crazed Kamikaze assault drove witchy broomsticks into the frozen earth.
A taut sky of drab neutralizes every contrast into either a luminescent shadow or an obscured light. The leaden color of rooftops spills over walls of their housing blocks and factories. The skyscrapers indistinguishable of corporate strength serve only to tie the ashen metropolis to a looming sky. Tires pulverize the road salts. The asphalt turns pale. The cars wear coat of dried mud. They are the same.
I have just come from a steam-room that springs from the imaginations of the Ancient Turks. The hot fog never cools. It knows no chill. Thermostatically controlled and constant, warm wetness spews forth, soothes, and purifies. I expose myself to an artificial cloud of Spring water and Summer heat.
Cold radiates from the concrete sidewalk and stone wall where I wait for the bus. The contrast between my body heat inside my wraps and the outside ambient temperature pings like a wine goblet in a black-tied dining room. A cashmere scarf, a knit hat, fur lined leather gloves, and my charcoal vicuna coat of full length hold in the moisture and heat of my bath. But, I look like everything else. I sink into the anonymity of the scene. The only individualism apparent is the varying rhythms of our breaths.
Busses pass by, and I can see mine approach from a distance. Block by block, it picks its way through rush-hours traffic collecting fares. By the time it gets to me, it is already full of dark quilted cocoons piled up amongst the seats. I make my way to the banquette across the back. The heating thaws my cheekbones and earlobes. My eyes squint beneath the frigid glare of the bus’s fluorescent strips. We turn right onto Reading Road.
As we climb the hill out of downtown, a leaking iPod’s rattles the cellophane beat; insulation muffles conversations; friends unrecognizing each other pass by without a word. They cloak their identities from the cold. The turbulence of the ride lulls the young teenage girl next to me asleep. Slowly her head, balanced on a mittened hand, begins to droop which starts the collapse of her torso under a weight of gravity and fatigue. She naps in city-block lengths. Each stop brings her back to consciousness. Each start launches her back to Dreamland. The warmth of the bus has that effect.
Outside, the street scene becomes strobic. Flashes of light compete with shadows of dark passing through or reflecting off of the window to produce the cinematic effect of “now you see it—now you don’t”. Amorphous zombies crowd to board our arriving bus more for its warmth than its transport. Other passengers discharge into the compromised melee of this wintery twilight. I begin to see my apartment building hunkered down on the next hill. I reach up to pull the cord.
A perky TV weather girl greets me at the door. With her light-projected-on-a-wall way, she says: “In the tri-state area, we are expecting accumulations of three to four inches tomorrow. Drivers should take care when goi…”
But, we knew that. The snow sits just above the sky. Waiting. You can feel it.
