Theme Thursday: Dreaming

Dec. 18, Wednesday of the 3rd Week of Advent, Day Three of the Christmas Novena.

f/1.8  //  ISO ???  //  ???

Can you totally tell this is tampered with in Picmonkey to make it look like snow?

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas.

As I write this late(ish) on Wednesday night, sleepless and uncomfortable from yet another virus, I'm predicting that the popular Christmas song (and movie!  twice!) is Cari's inspiration for this week's Theme Thursday.  Sadly, there will be no snow for us this Christmas, lest glacial melting and global warming take vengeance and usher on the Apocalypse . . . and that's just no fun and not what I had in mind for Jesus's coming, even the second one.

But I do dream of white Christmases, and dreaming is memory--at least, they must come from the same place in the soul.  And even though I now live in a sub-tropic clime, I'm a child of Midwestern winters, and the hard, warm snow that fell on flat, dry grass, lending its porcelain silence to a drab and weary backdrop.

I remember waking in the dark of early morning, breath held.  Even if no word came from the television that school was canceled due to snow-blocked roads, I still thrilled to step out into the white-and-black world.  Snow makes stars sharper, somehow.  I'd bundle up and go out early to wait on the corner of the street.  My feet were the first imprint; it was surreal, like crossing finest sand on a beach no human soul had touched on another planet.  Everything was suddenly closer, the world made smaller; you know, sharper, like when you twist your camera lens and everything comes into focus, so that you can see each tiny grain of glass.  As if the light reflected drew the sky down to gaze at her own reflection.  I stood there for ten, fifteen--twenty minutes well before I had to; before the other children--noisy, shoving and joking, oblivious--came out to wait with me; before the squat bus lumbered over the road toward us, and broke my shimmering bubble of infinite yet self-contained existence.

I mean, there's more than one reason it's called a snowglobe.