O’er the Fields We Go, not laughing

The winter sky here in Michigan is just beautiful, a Turner painting with soft colors and tattered clouds against a slate blue/gray background. Dark branches of trees silhouette the horizon—though bare, a kind of promise, spring and green.

I often ride home into this sunset. Or complete darkness, with only car headlights glancing to and fro. The other night after an afternoon of snowfall, I made my way down Central Park to a busy slushy intersection and onto the sidewalk where my tires crunch crunch over the new fallen snow.

If all this sounds like a Winter Wonderland then yes, but it is also terrifying. I’m on a bike. Fishtailing and constantly worried about slipping on ice.

So last Tuesday when I awoke to get ready to ride to Grace’s house to babysit out the window in the near darkness of early morning was three inches of new snow. Oh my God.

A salt truck went by in my complex so I steadied myself and put on over pants, zipped up my parka, fitted my balaclava over my head. Despite treating the roads they were still snowy as I tracked through a housing estate to get to Cornell Rd. Once there I. Just. Let. Go. Pushed off into the roadway.

There was minimal traffic, but every headlight ahead or car back made my heart race. As well as the glops of snow dropping from tree boughs overhead, and the watery run-off from banks lining the road. I was so tense, I thought I’d break in two. I imagined my tires sliding and being thrown under the wheels of a car. Somehow the 3 miles went by.

But in the middle, at a dip, where off to the left I knew there was a hidden pond, a white mist wafted and in the twinkling crystals permeating the air the whole world shone. A hush all around me. I was terrified and awe-struck all at once, a half second moment of death and re-birth: the realization that in this crux of time I was alive, my senses alert to beauty all around me.

It is something I do not want to relive yet cannot erase from my mind, the imprint of that vision.