This most recent snow of Christmas Day gave me a few ideas about which to write.
On Christmas Eve, the minister at my church broke bread at communion, and when the snow of Christmas Day finally stopped on the day after Christmas, I broke ěcommunal sizeî pieces of bread and tossed them onto the snow of my porch for the birds to partake.
I later noticed two kinds of tracks where I had thrown the bread. One was the characteristic shape of bird tracks, where they had descended onto the snow, while the other kind of print consisted of the impressions made by my fallen pieces of bread, now eaten, but their ětracksî remaining. While uniformity of species characterized the bird track shapes, randomness best described the shapes of the tracks of my torn bits of bread.
This ěwetî snow, being so easily compactible, amazed my son Jeremy and daughter-in-law Rose, especially when the snow around her feet came up, attached to her shoes with each step, revealing the ground underneath and making it seem as if she were taking her snow footprints with her as she walked. The snow sticking to the bottom of her shoes expanded out to such an extent as to make it look as if she were wearing ěsnow snowshoes.î Just like these ěsnow snowshoes,î in other places clumps of snow were falling off limbs, then striking and sinking below the surface of the fallen snow, as if the snow were making ěsnowprintsî of itself.
My neighbor made a snowman and used holly leaves for its hair. Although not laurel leaves, the snowman looked a little reminiscent of Caesar. Of course, Caesar himself was not rotund, but the snowman represented the kind of men of whom Caesar felt safe in surrounding himself, ěfat, sleek-headed men…î ( according to Shakespeare), not like Cassius (although Iíve yet to see a snowman which had a ělean and hungry lookî).
I wondered if Salisbury had received the same goodly amount of snow as had fallen here in Danville. I didnít have to wonder very long, for my friends Charlie and Pam sent me a marvelous, beautiful slide show via e-mail, consisting of pictures of their home and yard covered in snow. They live in the house on Old Concord Road where I grew up.
In addition to the front yard, Charlie also took pictures at the woodsí edge, along with some upward-looking pictures of what, in the spring and summer was the tree canopy, but now was a canopy of snow-filled branches. Each of those greatly multiple number of branches and twigs was covered with snow to such an extent as to make it appear just as difficult for the sunlight to reach the ground as it was during the spring and summer, when a great mass of leaves filled the sky there.
One time, I had printed off a few copies of the old snow pictures frequently taken by my brother Joe and me in the late 1950s and early 1960s and sent them to Charlie and Pam. I told them about some of the photography tricks that Joe and I would use to make the snowfall appear to be much greater than what it was. In one of Charlieís pictures, he shot from low to the ground, looking toward the house, the same trick which Joe and I would use to ěproduceî massive snows. Itís nice to know that even though it has been many years since Joe and I lived there, the current owners seem to have adopted the Williamsí ěangleî on things.
The last scene of the slide show made it become the story of a man enjoying the snow with his camera before finally returning inside and depositing his snow-boots close by the doorway. The final slide pictured Charlieís boots, which he had set close to a hook rug in the proximity of the door. That rug reminded me of the same type of rug, in varying sizes, which were placed in various areas of the house when I lived there.
Charlie told me that Pam had seen some tracks in the snow around one outside corner of the house, and wondered if they were his. He told her that they werenít, but then thought afterwards that he might have walked there and just forgotten. I told Charlie over the phone from here in Danville that they definitely werenít mine, since I donít drive in the snow and since my ěghostî and physical self are still attached to each other here, almost a couple hours of travel time north of Salisbury.
Someday, when such physical things donít matter any more, my soul would probably enjoy making some sort of track, in some future snowfall, in the yard of the house on the Old Concord Road, where that soul started.