Crossing paths with yourself

Reflections from a rare, southern snow day

Friday morning, I awoke to a blank page. More precisely, I awoke to a neighbor’s text that read, “Holy f*cking shit, look out your window right now,” and, upon that urging, discovered a world transformed. If you’re not from the deep south, you might not fully comprehend the way more than an inch of snow, the kind that sticks and looks like grounded clouds instead of dandruff, feels like a minor miracle. We all become kids for the day, layering up every piece of clothing we have and sliding down the nearest incline on pool floats, collapsed cardboard, trashcan lids.

I moved my morning meeting (“Dear team, it is actively snowing here. I rescheduled for this afternoon. I hope you understand.”), filled a thermos with coffee, pulled on my most waterproof boots, and started crunching toward the park at the end of my street to meet my neighbor.

An overnight winter storm is a reliable correspondent, recording every incident in its snowy stenography. I was one of the first people out on the street, but I could see the evidence of the morning’s activity: a family had been out walking their dog (big boot prints, my-sized boot prints, adorably tiny boot prints, the upside-down semicolons of paw-beans and claws). A few tire treads clustered toward the center of the unsalted, invisible road. A single bumper sat abandoned on the sidewalk.

Without the clear lines made by medians and sidewalk edges, my path meandered. I wasn’t sure if there was asphalt or concrete or grass beneath my boot soles. I walked in slow curves until I realized I was halfway in the road or walking through someone’s yard before course correcting.

The park was a blast. My friend’s dog behaved as if there were no greater delight in heaven or on earth than burrowing her snoot into an undisturbed pile of snow or snapping her long jaws around a lobbed snowball. We made a big bootie snowgal, drew shapes in the picnic table’s pillow of white, and starfished our arms and legs to make grassy snow angels before the damp and cold started to creep into my fingertips, and I turned back for home.

My friend is younger than I am by about a decade, at that tipping point between the self-destructive chaos of one’s twenties and the wildly disparate trade routes of the thirties. She’s trying to make sense of all the things that distinctly do not make sense about life, the things that you just learn to build additions onto your heart to hold. And in one of the extra rooms of my own ramshackle heart, I hold tremendous compassion for her and her tender becoming. At that age, when I stumbled through my own personal Revelations, I didn’t do it with half the grace; I more resembled the “rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem” than a paragon of introspection.

Walking back to my place, I encountered my own footprints, softened a little by the fresh snow. I placed my feet beside each one, toe to heel. They formed a set of single quotation marks, a gentle greeting between two selves separated by an hour and a half of snow romping: one giddy, one a little tired and frostbitten, both elated.

The media of my childhood vastly over prepared me for a number of obscure perils. The Bermuda Triangle. Hypodermic needles at gas pumps. And perhaps the least comprehensible: quicksand. Despite living in a landlocked city with red clay soil, I still committed to memory the steps for freeing myself from its dangerous pull: stay calm, wiggle your legs, lean back to create as much surface area as possible, and backstroke your way to solid ground.

It will come as a surprise to no one that I have never had to implement these maneuvers. One time, on a trip to a Georgia barrier island, I lost a single shoe to the sucking silt. That’s about as close to this particular danger as I’ve ever been. But I still viscerally know the fear, still feel it land on my chest like an unrepentant housecat. Only now, I’ve graduated beyond that cartoon threat to quicksand’s more existential cousin: stasis.

I’m the kind of person who hunkers in for the long haul. I’ve been at the same job for over a decade, I’m living in the same city I grew up in, my closest friends have been in my orbit for quite a while. In general, I subscribe to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” plan, which often leaves me awake nights wondering if I’ve fooled myself into confusing a fear of change with satisfaction, if there was some bright tallship full of promise I blithely watched sail away from my known, comfortable shore. If I’ve stalled out, stopped growing.

It's easy to mistake same-ness for stuck-ness, to think you’re on a hamster wheel of identical thoughts, worries, dissatisfactions year after year. Consider, perhaps, the perspective shift from a loop to a spiral – the same sights, but sliding further from view almost imperceptibly with each revolution. For those of us who don’t upend our lives periodically to see where the pieces fall, it’s a subtle exercise. One must become a tracker of her own interiority, noticing the hidden stories within the landscape.

I used to assume beavers hibernated in winter like bears because of their sudden absence, the way the activity around their lodge falls silent. But they never stop their ceaseless back and forth, they merely slip their path beneath the ice. A trail of silver bubbles like a mottled mercury mirror reveals the secret route of their coming and going. Similarly, a subtle tunneling in a hedge can reveal a traffic pattern of critters even when none can be seen. Their movements leave readable marks on the world around them. (A perfect, Sussex dialect term for this little hollow is a “smeuse.”)

A few months back, I was presented with a possibility that would have radically altered the trajectory of my life, something that a younger me had yearned for. My answer was immediate; I knew it wasn’t for me. And in that moment, I collided with a version of myself that didn’t recognize me at first, that had to do a double take. I felt a dissonant tension percolating. This time it was not from the quicksand fear of stasis but from having travelled so far that I had to reacquaint myself with my own reflection.

Walking home, I laughed as I saw just how meandering my path had been on the way to the park. It’s much easier to see where you’re going when you can, quite literally, see where you’ve been. And it’s good, on a day out of time behind a scrim of white, to cross paths with yourself and greet all the people you’ve been. They all love a snow day.

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Publication News:

I’m pleased to let you know that the piece I wrote for The Bitter Southerner’s Issue No. 9, “Witching Water: In Search of the Unseen” has been published online and you can read it here.

If you’ve always been curious about water witching, have a great uncle who dowsed for the family well, enjoy exploring phenomena that skirt the edge of mystery, consider yourself more of a skeptic, or happen to have a thing for the origins of radio, consider giving it a glance.

I also piece in the last issue of American Craft profiling the generous and lovely Susanna Cromwell and how her paper quilts are a form of prayer. You can give that a read or view more of her work.