Pause for the White-Eyed Blanket

For Day 25 of the @BestSelfCo Edison Deck Challenge I chose the experience card that asks, “Would you rather have a rewind or pause button on your life?”

It’s the perfect card to coincide with the first snow fall in the urban areas of the Pacific Northwest. An evergreen winter in a moderate climate requires little adaptation and is a gradual almost unspectacular acknowledgement of the changing season. There are those that grumble and complain at even a dusting of snow and would in a heartbeat push the rewind button and adjust the thermostat or the weather forecast. Or perhaps gleefully choose to rewind to a pre-pandemic vacation in tropical climes. The rewind button allows one to relive a portion of one's life, much like viewing a re-run where you know the plot, the laugh track, and the dramatic twists. I have to say, I’ve never been a big fan of re-runs. You may gain more perspective, but the spontaneity of the first experience is forever lost.

Just like the first snowfall, that causes us to stop and take notice of the world around us suddenly transformed; I would select the pause button. I love how the white blanket softens all the rough edges and creates a new sound stage where we are covered in quiet. The pause button allows us, or more accurately beckons us, to reflect. It asks us to take stock of where we are, where we might want to go, and brings with it a soft landing to look at the past through a lens of nostalgia and new light source. The past is always easier when viewed through the glistening glow of a snow-laden path.

Yesterday, in the evening dark I took a walk with my yearling pup; he was so curious about the familiar paths that are now different in every way, requiring different footing, different breathing, and new perspective. I loved the shock he experienced as he breathed in the snow dusting every branch and snorted as he tried to take large mouthfuls, reveling in the odd texture and the ethereal solidity melting faster than the cold could chill. His innocence required mine as well. As we walked, we reached a pristine patch of snow, untouched and lit by neighborhood Christmas lights twinkling from the roof eaves and tree branches. The pause allows one to shed inhibitions that are learned through what we call “adulthood” and do what the free spirit of the beginner or “child’s mind” would do without contemplation. I slowly lowered myself backwards, taking care that I now had to take stock of a healing bone and laid back into the snow. My limbs gleefully followed the familiar kinetic motions of making a snow angel. The young pup, still on leash in my hand, leaped and tugged, not familiar with his owner being prone in this virgin white world. He licked my face and pulled and prodded trying to move me from prone to upright. It’s good to know that if I were to fall, he would be at my side to help me up, making such a ruckus that if I didn’t respond, someone would come to investigate.

I stood up, brushed the powdery snow off, and looked over my shoulder. No snow angel imprint this evening as this snow is too dry and light to make an impression. It was almost as if I wasn’t ever there. That is unusual for this area. We usually have the occasional snow, wet and good for packing snowballs, making foot prints, and building snowmen. It normally lasts no more than 24 hours and melts away, or if unlucky and the temperature drops, we find ourselves amidst an icy treacherous mess imbedded with sand, salt, and complaints. But, this snow is different. The temperature was unseasonably cold to begin with, and the snow is dry and sustaining. Skiers would love this snow.

The pause button has also brought the neighbors out. The neighbors we’ve never met, most moving in over the last 24 months, bring their children with them grasping newly acquired sledding discs, skis, or snowboards. They discover the hill we live on, bereft of any motor vehicles, makes a snow sport paradise. Adults keep watch at the top and bottom of the hill as sliders of all sorts make their way down. Yet, they keep to themselves, not introducing themselves to each other and take my outreached hand as an oddity. Blame it on the pandemic. It made me think of how a similar snow many years ago, brought us out with our daughter and the neighbors followed suit. We knew each other and our kids played regularly together with a gate between our backyards making a bigger playground. The neighbors across our street with children all grown and departed, opened their doors and served hot chocolate to the kids, and stronger libations were offered to the adults. We learned about our hosts' lives, he a retired test pilot for the US Air Force and she a tall, red-headed spitfire that threw extravagant parties for the service families in Morocco, Asia or wherever they were stationed. She was a rule breaker through and through and I felt an immediate kinship. This evening, the snow pushed the pause button calling this memory forward. Earlier in the evening an aid vehicle with a police escort somehow made their way up our unplowed hill and stopped in front of their house. The test pilot was being taken to hospice. This wasn’t the first time, but I had a foreboding that it might be the last. We are the only ones left on the block that would remember that snowy evening so long ago. She was the one that greeted me several months ago at our joint mail box excited to have me home again after six years working elsewhere, proclaiming she would have to have a welcome home party. As I sit with this pause button, it makes me reflect on perhaps it is time for me to make a neighborly gesture, be it a card, an offer of food, or assistance.

A bird that I don’t recognize, not a robin as its breast is dirty yellow-orange with a brown band that stands in for a bow tie, perhaps it’s a varied thrush, lights on the front step, pecking through the flowerpots for anything that could be food. Dispersed seeds, rotting leaves covering an insect hiding from the cold, anything. I wonder if its feet get cold and think about a poem I read once by Mary Oliver about the origin of snow, the falling feathers of a bird, nesting in the upper reaches of a tall pine.

White-Eyes

BY MARY OLIVER

In winter

all the singing is in

the tops of the trees

where the wind-bird

with its white eyes

shoves and pushes

among the branches.

Like any of us

he wants to go to sleep,

but he's restless—

he has an idea,

and slowly it unfolds

from under his beating wings

as long as he stays awake.

But his big, round music, after all,

is too breathy to last.

So, it's over.

In the pine-crown

he makes his nest,

he's done all he can.

I don't know the name of this bird,

I only imagine his glittering beak

tucked in a white wing

while the clouds—

which he has summoned

from the north—

which he has taught

to be mild, and silent—

thicken, and begin to fall

into the world below

like stars, or the feathers

of some unimaginable bird

that loves us,

that is asleep now, and silent—

that has turned itself

into snow.

Yes, I would always opt for the pause button, never going backward, but taking a moment to take in the present moment. If I’m lucky, that moment will present itself like a silent snowy blanket that forces me to take notice, a moment not to be denied. It will show that the world is a serene, beautiful place, a place inhabited by magical creatures like the white-eyed or yellow breasted bird. If I take a moment to pause.