Snow in New York City. I'm not sure there is anything -- no, I'm rather sure there isn't -- anything quite like it. It doesn't fall, it swirls. It doesnt stick, it slops. And it might be one of the only forms of weather in New York that doesn't smell.
This wintry day in this dozing but never asleep city on this over easy Saturday, I am in search of calm. Absolvement. Effortless existence. Peace of heart (I already found peace of mind last night over half a bottle of Jameson in a downtown dive bar). Yes, I'm rummaging through my closet for it. Scrubbing my kitchen sink in search of it. Scrouging around the basement laundry room with socks in hand waiting for it to sudse up. Sprinting to Brooklyn Bridge in the whirling snow to get to it. Finally, after my third cup of green tea with my blood sugar around my ankles, I'm hooding up and hitting the sidewalk on a determined mission to find it. Clearly, inner peace does not hang around New York apartments very often.
Unlike most places, New York does not get any quieter when it snows. Taxis still rush, salt-covered sidewalks crunch and your neighbors still march to the grocery stores to desparately hoard frozen shrimp and red wine. That serene feeling of inpenetrable safety that often fuzzes in over sleepy hometowns when it snows runs straight into the gutters with monday's spilt coffee in New York City. If anything, you're even more likely to get hit by a taxi or run into an ex on this kind of day. But at the same time, its kind of refreshing. It allows you to float the streets like some kind of hooded phantom, wrapped in layers and every inch of you covered from the wind, like some invisible, lucid presence moving through the city. So Im a tower of wool and down, weaving in and out of the grocery soldiers, on my own little wooly island, only moving. And underneath my scarf and hat I am smiling.
I arrive at my favorite cafe, find my favorite soup on the menu and my favorite spot by the window unoccupied with an unhindered view of 1st ave. By now this steady power sugar dusting of an urban snow storm has turned blowing, wet and foggy with snowflakes through the window. As I drip soup all over the counter, somewhere in between the tomatoes and the undercooked (but still so delicious!) green lentils, I bite into momentary inner peace. For a whole 20 minutes I haven't thought about the next 20. No horn honking can herd me home, no unhappy customer can rattle my ripple-less calm, no solitary meal can make me feel completely alone.
The dawn of a new year has come and gone in the mouth of crisis - an economy gone sour, an industry in crisis, a family in limbo and a life in jeapoardy. A grueling, messy and defining year it was - a year of guts and grime and so many come-to-jesus moments in between that forge new paths through the heart, in a place-here-on-earth kind of way. No pain could be less forgiving, no relief could be more perfect, no change more changed, no expectations less expected. No lesson better learned. No love less lost. The snowflakes are thick now, casting my own reflection back to me in the window as the street thickens. Nothing slows or stops, like it does in the movies. No sound is drowned out. And yet I'm suddenly swirling in stillness - one hooded sillouette in a shrouded snowy New York City window looking out on her life and sending 2008 off in a cosmic Thank You note addressed to fate. Of all the defining and already forgotten moments in 2008, only two footnotes will fit in that envelope. One life saved and two lives lived - both just a little bit larger before. And all the other lives that surround just the one - marching on toward 2009 like New Yorkers to the grocery in a snow storm - fiercly and with all the hope in the world to make it to the frozen shrimp coctail before close.
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