I’ll slow down any day for snow.
These crystalline motes that hold the secret of life captive in sparkling beauty are collecting on my almost-balcony tonight. And I’m warm and folded in a blanket, resting against cushions and pillows, just inches from it all. I’ve just read and read and read.
Even the cold pizza straight out of the box was romantic.
Like, tonight, I’m a real student. Like Pinocchio, I’m now a real boy.
I know a story about America in which a Father, coughing and pale from days in the coal mines, drinks himself half to death over a still-born baby. The still-born child is out of the ordinary. The near-death drinking isn’t.
The father collects that little body in some spare blanket, soiled in blood and afterbirth, and carries it through town on a muggy Midwest night in August. Or maybe a crisp November night on the plains. It doesn’t matter. He’s alone and the child’s body is cold and blue in one arm. He’s dragging in his free hand a shovel.
He finds some corner of the town cemetery no one will be jealous of and he sets to digging, swigging at the bottle in his back pocket when it occurs to him to swig. When the hole seems deep enough or when he can’t keep his balance over its lip anymore, he places that little stiffening body at its bottom.
And for an hour he anoints the soil quickly filling this little grave with his tears and his sputum and his retchings. He does his best to hide any sign of a burial. So no one asks. So no one knows.
When he awakes somewhere unlikely the next morning, his wife wants to know where her baby is buried. Where’s her little child. Her beloved passenger of all those months.
And he doesn’t know. He can’t remember. He'd drank so much. It had been so dark. She walks the rows of the town cemetery, but every over-turned stone or patch of grass looks like every other.
She never mentions it to him again. But often times, as he’d endure a scolding through a hang over, she’d pause and look east and he’d nearly stop breathing.
Being in my twenties often feels like being that little infant child on the day of the resurrection of the body. So confused and sad and lost, having passed through the suffocating crush of earthen darkness that our forbearers have baptized in mourning and dying and self-pity, only to realize we’ve no idea which way is home.
But what if the last few layers of our eschatological ascent are through crisp, fresh-fallen snow that our own lively body heat melts into a new baptism. And so we come to stand, people anew, warmed by the Son and ready to disturb the still and quiet of a world in waiting.
