It has been one year since I saw my brother, and one year since I saw snow.
Last January, those first days of the new year feeble as sleeping breath, we traveled north from Philadelphia to Vermont, then to Maine. Our trip lasted for a few days. It was before most people knew what was coming, when that kind of travel could still feel routine.
The morning we drove from Burlington to Greensboro Bend, the fields were dusted in white, and by the time we arrived at Hill Farmstead, tentative flakes had turned into an almost-blizzard. In the recent years of my life, snow has gone from regular occurrence to novelty, a fragment of the old world at odds with the current one’s doomy warming. That day, I joyed to see it. For a while we stood outside on the porch, my Dark Lager chilled further by the cold wind, sable on white. The snow settled in our hair and turned into water once we went inside to eat meat pies and buy an armful of bottles and drink one more glass.
That trip comes back now in juicy blazes, vivid as winter citrus. I’m a little suspicious of its intensity. Was that porch truly so much like a snow globe, not just inconveniently damp, and slippery? Was that really a bear cub we saw, loping across the road? In retrospect, I might be exaggerating the goodness of the lobster roll eaten by late-night red neon, the fireside steak, the cheese plate drunkenly ravaged.
Memory has never quite known what to do with the senses; the problem is that we live in memory’s world now. There is an anesthetizing quality to lockdown, a dulling of all sensation. Most days I have the impression of observing my life through a pane of glass, past experiences stilled at their most beautiful, pinned through the thorax to corkboard. The brain is a trickster god, and in such times, who can really blame it for its flights of fancy? Spend enough time with it and it will convince you that those wings are still moving, that there’s life in them yet.
