No Camera

December 27, the day after the day after Christmas. The evergreens outside are heavy from last night's snow. There is a winter brightness outside - it is early in the morning - and when I look out my window the world appears black and white, like an Ansel Adams photograph. The snow is a true white, not a blue white or a warm yellow white. The sun is nowhere to be seen, yet. The trees outside, bigger than the one that sits in our living room, lurch forward somewhat, occasionally bending their tops when a wind passes by. I sit in a living room artificially lit from the stove light in the kitchen. Although there are colors here - the red from the potted pointsettias and the ornaments on the tree, the blue swivel chair in the corner, and the oranges and yellows from the spines of the paperbacks on our bookshelves - the room is dark and flat compared to the beautiful, stark country on the other side of the glass door.

I have no camera this morning. Roger has probably put it away in the guest bedroom where our guests are rightfully sleeping. If I had one, I still might not have taken a picture. I can't work the flash correctly. And I would be afraid to push open the screen door behind the glass one; it has a bad habit of falling off its track. And who wants a picture of the outdoors with a screen interrupting the vast whiteness?

The trees look as if they are in conversation, discussing whether to approach our porch.

It's not a very welcoming porch. Fallen snow has piled about two inches above the wood. It is a barren porch, with only a broken pot in the corner. The pot had once held a dying spider plant. We had put it outside in late August hoping it would get more sun. We left it there through fall and early winter. When the plant finally died, we emptied the pot and pushed it into the corner. Rain came, filling the hole, and then the temperature dropped, turning the collected rain into ice. Then even colder days came to pass and the ice expanded and the pot started to crack. The uneven pieces of ceramic fell away from the short column of ice like wilted petals. Eventually the ice itself will melt away, leaving only the broken pot. The whole thing, a months-long story, seems like the saddest poem.

It is snowing again. The lightest snow. You can only see it falling when you look at the dark patches in the trees.