Forgive us our Sins

        I didn’t think I would see it this year. As I sit perched in my freezing attic, cross legged on the uneven wood floor nested in blankets, I make my observations. I can’t sleep- and why should I? I am accustomed to the quiet, to the uncertain temperatures, to the sounds of whatever it is that lives in the charred ghost of the woods now. I have made myself like the scratchy, pilled cotton blankets stored up here. But it has been three years and I must sit in my makeshift observation tower ducked under the slant in the ceiling watching just in case. I haven’t needed this many blankets in years. It is midnight now, or six past, and twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. This is odd, given everything. I take out my recorder and make note of it.

“It is 12:07, December 13^th,” I start, and Winter pokes her head out shyly from the clouds. Perhaps the moon sneezed, just now, and that is what this is. The upstairs window is the draftiest and I will no doubt pay for sitting here. But it is 12:07 December 13^th, and this is the highest and largest window in the house and now I can see the sky. There is no one here to stop me, after all. It falls like ash but there is no smoke. I checked. The little clusters are floating down, some of them knocking into others and joining them in an embrace. Some of them melt before they make it to the earth. But some of them are resilient, or maybe lucky, and perch gently on dry patches of grass.

“Sorry. It is 12:07, December 13^th, two-thousand and…now. It is currently 28 degrees Fahrenheit where I am. Wolfeboro, if place names still mean things. There still are no stars, but there are clouds. It is currently snowing. It is currently beautiful.” I put down the recorder and get dizzy watching them spin to survive.

Those that do coat the lawn in a thin layer of white. I have seen this image before, much brighter. It is seared into my memory. It cracked the glass on one of the windowpanes I could not reach. That is why the draft. I can’t ever get high enough to fix it. I have not seen this image before. The forest is a haze now, like being viewed through gauze.

Not like gauze.

Not like ash.

Not like anything the skies here have known in fourteen years. 28 degrees in December. 28. We will never have been gone long enough for it to be like it was, but 28 degrees is few enough degrees to hope. 28 degrees is few enough degrees for snow.

“The wind is blowing at what looks like 9mph, but I cant see the anemometer just now. Because of the snow…” I cannot help but laugh. “F-fee-feel free…oh my god…feel free to to to strike the laughter from the record.” I choke out between hiccups, “Feel free to -oh lord- strike the laughter from the record. I only wish you could see it just now. Its just incredible. Its like when a fire pops and sends up plumes of ash. But multiply it by ten. Multiply it by fifteen. God…I wish you could see it. It’s heavier than ash, almost, because of the way it clumps midair. I mean I know we know the science behind snow but-god- there’s a feeling behind it. Christ that’s so corny.” I shake my head at myself. “Strike that from the record. Dad said there was poetry in science, but I can only do the science part, I’m afraid. It is 12:30 now, and there looks to be a fair amount of snow. The lawn is almost half covered. God it just keeps coming. I’m trying to think of all the implications. Like maybe this is how I go out. This is how the world ends. But its all too peaceful, like somehow everything is dampened. Its muted.”

I may be losing my mind. It is the three year anniversary of the most catastrophic natural disaster on the east coast. I am a woman of science. I need to figure out why this could be dangerous, what all this could mean. But just now, all I can do is laugh quietly. All I can do is feel like dad is on the floor next to me with the recorder, telling jokes into the microphone to lighten up his observations.

He would say he was too warm and give me one of his blankets too. “This is Dr. Daniel Sims and junior Dr. Aubree Sims, it is half past midnight and two and a half past junior Dr. Sims’ bedtime.” But I would beg him to teach me the weather as an excuse to stay up. I was too old for bed times and too old for begging to stay up, all I really wanted was to learn about the weather. His weather. I spent every night since the move up in that attic with him, memorizing the lines from his PhD program, acting as if he could grant me a degree, too. One day he did, after I spent an hour talking over him during his recordings for the day like one of his students from a lecture course. I was all too ready to tell him everything he already knew, just to prove I knew it too. He drew it on a faded piece of pink construction paper in ballpoint pen.

“Dad,” I accepted it, “I’m 25. Do you think construction paper is really legally binding?”

“Aubree, I stopped teaching a decade ago, none of this is legally binding. I’m not even sure those words mean anything now dear.” I framed my fake PhD declaring me a fake Doctor of Meteorology from my real dad, a real retired Professor of Meteorology. A real escaped professor. He said I knew how to do it on my own.

Now I do.       

“It is 12:34 AM December 13^th, this is Dr. Aubree Sims, it is 26 degrees Fahrenheit and snowing. The anemometer is completely obscured now, and it is snowing wicked hard.” I chuckle, “ ‘wicked hard’ is an official scientific measurement of snowfall. Dr. Sims would of course corroborate this fact were he here.”

He thought the last one was the last one. In a way, he was right, it was his last snow. But here she is again, Winter, asking if it is safe for her to play.

“Yes,” is fogged onto the glass. My forehead is pressed up to it. My eyes want to laser through it, I want to tumble forward out of the third story and be one of them. I want to be a snowflake, carried in the embrace of snowflakes and I want to gently kiss the scorched Earth. I do not think She would forgive me no matter how hard I begged. But winter is back to play for the night and that is enough consolation.

It is the first snow of the winter, the first snow of the past decade. It is the first time it has snowed since dad died, since the fire, since I was 16 and we had just run up north to watch the world end. I slept through the last one- dad’s last one. And when I woke he told me all about it like it was a dream he had. Now that I’m watching it I understand what he meant.

Time is happening around me.

In spite of me.

Maybe the Earth has forgiven us our sins against Her.