All day yesterday the snow fell. As I watched through this picture window, perched expectantly, like a dog waiting for the postman, it fell and it fell and it fell. This is the way of winter in Michigan, as the condensated wet of our gargantuan lake, dozens of miles away from where I sit, slips up into the sky, slides over and rains down a gorgeous hell of fluffy white. It’s a lake I’ve been making friends with for years, by way of my old camera, hesitant poems, and skittering walks along eroding beaches. But I am losing my thread here, as I so often do when Lake Michigan works her way into the mix. I was telling you about the snow, about how all day yesterday it fell. And it’s falling again today. Perhaps I should have started there. Here, I mean, in the present tense, describing how, today too, I have studied it through this enormous single-paned window, like a spectator at a ballgame or a shy boy leaning against the wall at a high school dance. Although there is a kind of peace here as I sit, and no reason for me to venture out today, I am itching to shovel the snow, craving the experience so exquisitely I can already feel the slice of the blade through the wet, white pile, and the flex and torque of my torso as I connect with and expel its heft.
Would this (possibly) weird desire make more sense if I were to clarify that what I really, truly, deeply want is to give myself over to the simplicity of it? Of being nothing more (or less) than an incremental mover of what has so undeniably and tangibly been laid before me as the earthly creature that I am? To stand out there alone in the too-coldness of the muted light, booted up, pink-cheeked and sniffly, pushing forward and twisting, creating tidy canals and uniform heaps, like a diligent ant or a beaver felling trees? To belong to a here where there is no need, or even any room, to argue, deny, or rationalize? Whatever I might think or feel about the snow, its awesome presence, its stark here-ness as the world that has been given to me right now, is undeniable. And so the restless animal of me longs to do something with it. I feel a pull to create momentary order from material chaos. Like the old woman who lived in a shoe. Like women everywhere sweeping and stirring, lugging laundry and water, pushing baby feet into boots and kneading bread. Like men building roads and digging tunnels, and working scythes through wheat as tall as they are.
I know it is a mark of my extraordinary privilege to be distant enough from physical labor to be capable of such desire. My attitude is probably unforgivably romantic and, for sure, born on the backs of countless current and past others, including my own parents, hard workers both, who helped lay the boards of the stage I now pace. I won’t even try to defend this longing. I mean, I am an intellectual worker, trading almost exclusively in words and ideas, abstractions that spiral outward into tangible artifacts only indirectly and distantly if at all. If my work were an animal, it would be a lizard, tenacious, observant, hunkered there in the periphery, a presence barely felt. Or maybe a frog resting tensely on the lip of a koi pond. At any rate, when these great storms come, mighty whomps of snow worthy of an Old Testament god, I feel called to a new/old vocation. One that feels both dramatic and intimate, reverberating in my dendrites and marrow. This is an invitation to leave the complicating cogs and tangles of my mind here on the side table, next to this burning candle and the book I’ve been reading. A book of things someone else thinks with her own busy mind, while, perhaps, just outside her window, snow blankets the world.
It’s not that there’s anything especially interesting about this desire. It arises from a place similar to that which makes me want to backpack, or permit myself to become “lost” in the woods, as I routinely do. It is partly that I want to experience myself as thrown, skin-on-skin, against the lines and textures of the earth, the usual, insulating layers stripped away. Then I can catch a glimpse of myself, like the actress startled at the distantly familiar, vulnerable beauty of her own make-up-stripped face in the mirror. But even as I wax lyrical about the prospect of shoveling snow, I am flooded with contradictions. For one thing, I notice that I’ve been describing the lure of the bodily, and of the work the body does, as if it were somehow at odds with the mental and psychological. But this, of course, is a lie. For I am, as most humans are, even to the core of my body, a creature of language. Words are not merely something I “express”—like a pasta maker expelling fettuccine—they are what I am. Their syntactical patterns and cadences give rise to this “I” I am being/doing as number and mathematics underlie music. Without a single compunction or scrap of humility, then, I stand here and proclaim my own glory: I am the word. More than that, I am the word made flesh.
It makes perfectly weird sense, then, that even before I have pushed my feet into wool socks warmed by the fire, or zipped myself into my heaviest, ugliest coat, I am already projecting myself back to this future place. To the time after this tiny patch of driveway snow will have been sculpted—superficially disciplined, I might say— by my mind and muscles and will. What I am telling you is that I already look forward to that delicious moment when, task completed, I will close my eyes, curl my fingers around a steaming mug of Earl Grey, and let myself fall like Moses into the swirling current of words. It thrills me to imagine and plan out my essay about shoveling snow: I will write about Lake Michigan, I think, about ants and beavers, about how sometimes it feels like the snow tugs me, body first, out into the arctic day. I will say something about the dignity of labor, and make at least some effort to name my own elitism. But mostly I will try to describe the pure cellular joy of being so united with the earth and the season and the shovel that I can hear the whisper of existence. Sitting here in a few hours, in the glow of this same candle, I will throw out words—like a sparkler or a fountain—the exhalations of a conceptual creature that I cannot help being.
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