Last night we took Snackers out for her midnight “perimeter check.” Our backyard is not, by any stretch of the imagination, ripe for burglars, but Snackers must, every evening, do a full circle around the house just in case untoward youths lurk in the trees. One of our cats comes out with us for this every night as well. She feels important being a part of this canine duty. She vanishes into the snow and burrows through a series of small tunnels she’s created in the drifts around our house. We mention this all because last night was especially weird. The sky was dark over our house, revealing the stars, but southward there crept a creepy, white, entity — A SNOWSTORM — and the two animals stopped in their tracks and stared for a hard, long while.
Something was coming. Not something wicked, necessarily, but a good old storm. The two animals tip-toed to the edge of the property, where there’s an old, overgrown fence. Usually there’s something to see back there: a neighbour, a squirrel, the scent of a dropped pizza from years past. But last night they stared up at the white entity creeping towards them. THIS IS THE BURGLAR, they yelled silently with their big cute eyes. YOU BETTER GET INSIDE GUYS! ABORT! ABORT!
Both bolted to our back door. We were interested in taking a moment — as life provides too few of these — to breathe in the frightening weather. But Snackers and her assistant (Lily, after Lilliput, because she’s very tiny) would have nothing of it. They scratched. They whined. Had the dead risen? Was this the apocalypse? Fortunately not. It was just a snowstorm. But we’re all a little more sensitive than usual these days, aren’t we? So we brushed the snow off the bottom of our pajamas and headed in.
This story has no relevance to this email. It’s just a nice story. Maybe it has something to do with the changes coming for everyone. Beautiful change. Frightening change. Both kinds? Perhaps it is the Rilke kind: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so, because it serenely disdains to destroy us.” Yikes. Thank God we have books, and that beauty can be packaged in a little thing we can hold in our hands.
Much love,
Jason and Vanessa
