A Forecast of Snow and Questions

I am standing at the window of my study.  I stare out at a sky that is a wide swath of mottled clouds the color of asphalt and the air is cold and dry.  The newly-risen sun is obscured, but its illumination is slowly adding depth and definition to the bleached-out grasses and empty branches that surround the small square box where Owen and I try to stay warm.

The cold and the stillness jumpstart the reminiscing that seems to be part and parcel of most days these days and I find my thoughts tumbling back to another cold January and another window.

Vi, a friend from law school, had invited me to visit her on Edisto Island.  The morning after my arrival, after a three-hour drive down two-lane blacktop, still a little sleep drunk, I stood quietly at the wide windows of the condominium living room and stared out at a golf course, its grass so green, so manicured, its surface so uniform that no one would ever mistake it for anything else.  About 25 yards away, down an easy slope, the tiniest trickle of a creek made a jagged slice across the smoothness.  A small wooden bridge, arced in a subtle rainbow, connected the two banks.

The sun had risen but its light had not yet made its way into fairway’s dim alley, buildings on one side, tall pine trees on the other.  I was considering walking out onto the porch to check the temperature when suddenly a deer, two deer – no, let me count them – eight deer scampered across the bridge into the woods. Like most things of surprising beauty, the scene unfolded too quickly to capture with a photograph. I stood at the window an extra moment making myself memorize the details.

The next day, headed home from my brief jaunt to the island, the vision of the deer came to me again and I found myself wondering why they had taken the bridge.  There was no logical reason they should have. The creek, narrow and shallow as it was, was no match for their long slender legs. They could have easily bounded over it with one stride, two at most, even the two yearlings at the end of the line.

How in the world had deer, wild and untamed, learned to use a bridge?

A few nights later I got a text message from my friend Ted: Look northwest in five minutes to see the International Space Station fly by.  I looked at the clock, gave the pot of soup on the stove another quick stir, and headed outside. The sky was dark and cloudy.  I doubted I would see anything, but wanted to be able to tell Ted that I had tried, so I arched my neck and looked toward the spot where the Space Station was supposed to appear.  And, lo and behold, it did!  For six or seven minutes I stood there in the darkness, my head moving like a pencil at the end of a geometry compass, tracing an arc through the night.

How in the world had people, so tame and so far removed from the wildness of the world, come to fly so far above the earth?

The memories drift off to wherever it is that memories sleep and I notice that the sky is no longer gray.  It is almost completely white, clouds spread from horizon to horizon interrupted in occasional spots by the softest of blues.  The question remains.

The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.  Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”

The world is full of questions – Will it snow? Will the power go out?  Will democracy survive? Venturing an answer, I have learned, will do nothing more than confirm my ignorance, reveal my ego, and set me up for disappointment.  Instead, I will – for today at least, inside my snug house, surrounded by books and memories – try to live the questions.

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