Ice, Snow, and Cold Things

    It's Saturday morning; I told my best friend that I was going to write about ice and snow.

    This week brought a lot of snow, ice, and pretty cold temperatures to the region and the rest of the country. I was able to go to work three days. I stayed home two of them, plus remained in the house Sunday, not going to church or anywhere else.

    I saw snow and ice on the local roads, cul-de-sacs, highways, and free ways. I helped move some snow, shovel, and push some vehicles that were stuck in my greater neighborhood. My own car got stuck a couple times, but I was able to move it by shimmying and moving it back and forth. 

    

    Big snow, big ice. We got off our son to the airport, where he is off to bigger and (better?) adventures and climes. Another country, other cultures and tongues. Different flavors and spices, sounds and thoughts.

    Perhaps a poem...

Arctic and Antarctic

    I was not too close, but close enough to drive to Whitehorse

  That is the Arctic, I am pretty sure.

  I have looked at the maps enough.

  I have perused, and contemplated, and etched out the lines of the circle in my head, almost down into my organs and bones.

  I have looked at that far off Antarctic continent, too.

  Even read a few books.

  A few films.

  I thought of Bear Island during the week, where the extreme

  Svalbard or Spitzbergen chunks of ice and mountainous snows

  Come to the screen.

  Like Disney or some movie maker did with foxes and mice on a downtown theatre, likely the Indiana Theatre, of my childhood.

    We played in ice and snow.

    Sledding, walking home from school, crunching the ice of the local creek at Bryan Park.

    I saw the smooth, crazily slick and hardened ice and snow fields of my work place this week,

    Harkening me back to the places that I have seen and witnessed

    The snows of mountain passes in the Andes or the Sierra Nevadas, the Uintahs or Wasatch Front of Utah, the Cascades with its luminous Mount Rainer

    Or picturesque, statuesque, Mount Hood of Oregon.

    Cold, freezing waters in the latest Tom Cruz Mission Impossible

    Endless ice and snow.

    

    We walked in it, slipped and almost fell on the way back from flavorful chicken wings and cheesy fries.

    It was a walk and visit to remember.

    We can love the ice and snow,

    Almost like we can cherish the distances, cold and isolated, of friends and family.

    Like when many of us leave, and have to die.

    The ice and snow of the planets, outer rims and reaches of space.

    The utter freezing and mostly silent depths of the most vast wastes of space, on and on, far from the sun.

    Jesus welcomes us back to the warm spots, the beaches and islands and hot jungles or cool mists of warmer climates, like Florida, or other such places of the absence of snow.

    But we welcome the cold times, even death.

    Because in this way we celebrate memory, love, and life.

    All of it, cold and hot, near and far, close and distant.

    Snow, ice, and the sun.

[Sunday review, looking for a typo... Nothing much, I guess.]