Books for Blankets

"I am sitting... looking out across the the backyard full of blue evening snow, everything is slick and crusty with ice, and it is very still. It's one of those winter evenings when the coldness of every single thing seems to slow down time... Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me..." ~The Time Traveler's Wife

The schools let out early that day in preparation for a storm that came a lot later than we anticipated. 

I looked out the window often throughout the morning and into the afternoon, in-between customers and during them, looking out into the dead world for the snow that we had been promised was coming. 

The buses canceled in waiting. 

It was only on my way home from work that tiny flakes started to fall onto the windshield of my car; only after I fell asleep in my bed was the world transformed, as it usually is. 

You cannot watch the change. It always comes suddenly, softly, while you are sleeping. It's like magic. Even if you are awake, it creeps in so silently, like someone slipping into bed late at night when their spouse is already dreaming.

 

 

I awoke in the evening inside a blue darkness. Outside my gently weeping windows the world had been dressed white.

I read in my bed for hours after, tucked into a soft blanket, my fingers curled around the large pages of my book, listening to the silence. 

I never thought this book, with its meadows and its picnics and sunny childhood days, would be a winter book. But now, reading it for the second time, I realized that it was. It is full of winter, full of festivities and New Years parties. It is full of snow banks, and cold naked nights, and stagnant winter days, and soft and still ones too. It is packed with cold pavements, and tragedies that happen on Christmas, and wedding days during snow storms. 

It is full of soft silent nights in which its characters curl up in bed with a book, or with the warm body of someone they love. 

It was the perfect book to keep you warm in bed on a night like this one.

 

 

The spell still hasn't broken. But the book was over by the time I made my way into the night to behold the winter's magic. The only disturbance in the snow was a cat's soft footprints and the showers of a tree laden white,  leaving trails of its own as it shed bits of its new coat. 

 

I crawled into bed after, with my mittens and boots drying downstairs and my book put aside on my nightstand without a slip to mark its place in time.  

 

It is strange how a narrative is remembered when it is over; not in thought-out paragraphs or ordered pages, but existing in one's head in fragments and duality, in coupled moments and disordered dialogue, misplaced moments stuck in sections of a nonsensical timeline. It is as if it has happened all at once, a stream of consequence nestled into a soft white night spent in reading, and nothing else.