Skyhalation

By Michael H. Kew

Once, snow was romantic.

My home was strong.

Snow was adored.

‘Til it went wrong.

Since Ash Wednesday a sweet solo doe had found shelter: my back deck, a roof of Port Orford cedar. We can see each other through the study's window. Together we lounge and watch sky exhale—sleet, snow, rain, graupel. Out between storm suites and sleeps she carefully hoofs, poking holes several inches into the drifts. Her grassy browselands are snuffed. And so she strips normally ignored evergreens—rhododendron, toyon, manzanita, even the wavyleaf silktassel near the stairs. Fare of undesirables. All 'round the house and adjacent hills, as the snow keeps falling and falling—desperate leaf depletions. The plants erase to ferny sprouts of black wire begging through frozen crystal. Until they can't.

For the first time, I crave grace from perversions of late winter, from the irrepressible black storm train of Alaskan gulf and its lure of arctic lobes.

This afternoon's snow shifts to sleet against skylight and the rash of grayscale against cloud. Gale surges and whips the white off tall conifers, boughs bowing—shuffling—shedding—and by nightfall the sky itself will crack.

Grace!

Squint into the fusion. Portal to cosmic floods. Upon these woods and prairie is a static deep glow unto the ashen echo of spinning constellations. I walk on slippery deck—startle dozing doe—and gaze straight up into Orion's belt. Beneath Gemini Moon the air smells of ice. Out west simmers a long-distance love affair—the first of March's five planetary conjunctions. On the same ecliptic longitude Venus and Jupiter will flare, soon subterranean with Earth's axial shift, these two white spider eyes in the pastels presaging equinox, the month by day a growing shine.

Thin scroll of cloud sweeps the firmament like an off-season Milky Way. Wheeling panoramas of transcendence slip me into "A Stream With Bright Fish" (Budd/Eno 1984), "stream" here being the astral dance, "fish" the stars.

But heavens will always reseal and weighten. By deep night the mysteries swell. House power again fails.

Heavy snowfall—a sinister silence.

New three-meter fissure above the kitchen table drops a scratch of white gypsum dust onto the brown floor. I sip tempranillo and drowse to purr of woodstove fan. One a.m.—shock-waked to more sleeplessness, to more cracks and creaks from manufactured-home roof nearing its death. Don earbuds with the upbeat Bach With Pluck! album. Try to relax and ignore imminence.

No.

Pinnacle to decades of incremental snow-load sag. A losing kiss with gravity.

Poppy-creaky-cracks crawl beyond dawn, a watery gray haze, reverb of white and wind whence I can see the night's surprising new foot of wet upon yesterday's surprise 14 and surprise 15 the night before that, sheeting the prior two-week base of typical mellow snowfall that was then fun and novel.

Across my ceiling I can also see the new large stress fractures and mutations. Each one pings a pang of paranoia. Chill fills the home. The snow's pressure is sharp knifemetal to the back of my neck.

Power remains out. Lane to main road is impassable. The snow continues and will. Fifty inches here is historic, my elevation just 1,650 feet and six miles from the Pacific.

Rush of nervous phonecalls—area residents, 911, sheriff, close friend with bottle jacks. Nearest neighbor with a borrowed farm tractor quickly clears road and driveway. A miracle. Bless him. Friend with jacks and lumber barely arrives via large 4WD and installs peaces of mind between floor and ceiling. Bless him.

I wonder about Miss Doe—what can she eat now that truly everything is buried?

Plunge down-mountain in first gear through blizzard with my three crying senior cats. Slide out at Dusty Lane. Regroup and reach vacant Brookings house, a refuge gifted by another friend. Bless her.

Sadly the doe and I would miss the Worm Moon, so-named for the rise of earthworms into a hemisphere ostensibly softened by season. In Old Rome, March was the year's first month. Earth would begin warming from winter's grasp into elongated sunlight. Equinox was near—Ostrana in pagan worlds. A brilliant solar festival. Rebirth, fertility, renewal.

I'll need a new roof.

Ensuing three leaden days of snowshoeing in from the county-plowed road to unknown house health. Each time, I expect the worst.

Lonesome slog of roof-clearance. Rakes, shovels, salt pellets. Mounds gather 'round the perimeter. Shards of ceiling crash and other sects bowl deeper; beams groan upon jacks. The wind shrieks. Snow seethes down and later is only made denser and heavier by sleet thinning to thick drizzle which soaks and pierces my panicking bones.

Day four. Still no doe, no new hoofprints in snow. By mid-afternoon the atmosphere uncoils, ushering not snow nor sleet but a roar of hard rain across the suffocated land. Galeswept and beaten, slowly the snow sulks forlorn and begins to look neolithic in the misty gray, its tumuli distorting and eroding to hammered platinum before eventually vanishing as vapor.

Vanquished by milder air and the shave of wind, days five and six lay zestfully buoyant. With no new snow, the thawful land flings alive with drip and running water refilling the greeny-brown hues of nude forest. Conifers again shed. Stains of soil and drowned flora reappear. Shrubs and seedlings emerge timidly, thrashed by the wind but again free and abreath.

Melt has never sounded so marvelous.

Day seven dazzles with further promise. Sky flexes into an enormous blue. Midmorning I roll up the mountain upon open roads. A golden interlude to properly shore the home until permanent repairs in coming months. Tomorrow the cats and I return.

And here she is, a tropism, Miss Doe dishing in full Sun on warmed earth edging my eastern yard. Her coat has unmatted. She's a nyctinastic bloom, reopened and beaming beyond the cold abyss. Time has slowed from stormy frenetics.

She stares into me, sunlight irrigating her large globed eyes. Leisured and deliberate, she maws madrone leaves. I imagine us here both pushing praise for the Sun. For grace. And for roofs. By month's end there would be more snow. More freeze. But it would also be spring. She knows today is our turn. Our turn, briefly, to exhale.

Photos: Kew.