I met a fellow cruncher today on the sidewalk. I was headed west, backpack full of impulse groceries (never shop when hungry) after a quick trip to get some flour. He was headed east. The sidewalk was clear in that section, surprisingly, and wide enough for two people to comfortably walk side-by-side without worrying about ice or snow. My toes were cold and my fingers too, high humidity probably, so I kept to the middle of the sidewalk, listening to my empty water bottle clink against the basil jar that I use to cart around sugar for tea. And then he came towards me, head down, hat and coat bundled securely, hands in his pockets. He walked unnecessarily close to the edge of the sidewalk, towards the still frozen bank of snow with its constant edge of melting ice. With every step his left toes came down at a little angle crunch before a right foot on the concrete before another toe-led step crunch chipping away tiny bits of ice crunch or smashing to smithereens the chunks already broken off crunch. He passed me in a heartbeat that fluttered with excitement. I've never met another cruncher, never seen one from afar. I thought I was alone in the slightly obsessive need to make the snow crumble as I walk, to hear my domination over the elements. I know now I am not alone. But does he?
The chinook is blowing. Unlike Laura, I wasn't woken in the middle of the night be the soft dripping of water, icicles melting off the roof and forming streams to join rivers flooding in the night. Instead the street noise holds off the whisper of the water but I can see the spreading stain of wetness on the sidewalk, the imperceptible sagging of the snowbanks. I can walk with my head up, my nose warm, in running shoes and without gloves. I can't feel the air but it's coming through, unmistakably, a spring thaw in February. I don't know my downstate weather patterns well enough to hope for permanence, but perhaps I will be the fool anyway. Last night I dreamt of ultimate again.
I am slipping on the sidewalk under a dark sky coming home from the office mesmerized by the flakes falling softly with no breath of wind covering the ice beneath with a soft dusting sparkling with the street lights.
Quiet dominates my landscape. Snow crunching delicately under my feet, stepping over drifts to cross the street standing out of the way of silent and few cars. Urbana is shut down, Champaign beyond my plows - no school for two days, no company, no eager students or panicked review for class. I walk, head down against the wind and brightness, up to see the crystalline blue sky, to an office where I know I will be alone all day with my Aeschylus, my Rhesus, Ovid and Hesiod. Everything in its Right Place. I wake up in my chair after twenty minutes, not sucking on my thumb, and Loula asks if I want to build a snowman with her. "A big one". But it's too powdery and we end up stacking chunks left behind from the sidewalk plows. Iphigenia at the altar, mute and resigned. My finger are cold, waxy and white at the tips when we go back inside. It tingles when I check my email (nothing) and I wrap up my hands in my scarf while I try to read book reviews from jstor. There is no speech these days, just listening to the computer's whir, the empty chatter of bad television, the chords of Thom Yorke that suck at some part of my mind and lead me to a melancholy joy. Valentine's Day, and I have unfrozen vegetable soup and hard boiled eggs for dinner. Ethan and I talk to confirm my inability to visit this weekend, our fears about school. They haven't plowed the front drive of the building - it's cut off totally from the street. I wonder at the mailman who has to lug his white heavy-duty plastic boxes with the blue eagles on the side, corrugated like cardboard, to and from the front doors now leaping over the plow's crust at the edge of the sidewalk, trying not to slip and lose the letters fluttering over the icy path. They say fedex and ups and dsl won't deliver. One foot, up to sixteen inches in some places. I relish the quiet - I can leave my windows open all night and sleep soundly, no buses wailing as they turn corners or wind whipping the branches outside. Engines running are few and far between, and even those are muted by the packed white mass beneath their tires. Someone yells at a student to get out of the street but there's nowhere else to walk. Home again in the evening, two days now, cold when I finally get in. When will they invent a nose-muff? There's no new tribune or campus paper and I read everything on Slate yesterday at lunch. I have left off talking to myself - I can't bear to break the calm with noise, to speak out anything impure into the chilled, crisp air. Like Ariel on land, I wander bemused and frightened through the halls waiting for the sunset when I know my prince will come.
I wonder at my new self-sufficiency, coupled with an even greater exterior dependence. I've traded day-long and late-night email exchanges for a solid phone conversation once a day and a short note sometime in the afternoon. Somehow, I am still satisfied despite the less frequent and intense contact. Maybe the stolen weekends help more than I realized - the hourly update suddenly seeming less relevant, less vital (and yes, I exaggerate). But the flipside of this is that You suffer, You my reader for you see I have left my computer by the wayside in this technological upgrade. I'm fed up with slow page loading, finicky virus software, pained booting up and down - I have not yet plugged in my computer since the semester started. It sits nestled tightly in my computer bag with the power cord squeezed into a zippered pockets; other drives and discs and instructions crammed here and there into all sorts of compartments - zippered, mesh, velcro. The weight rests heavily against my trashcan (is there irony or symbolic truth here? or just convenience?) which, when empty, will tip over if the bag becomes unbalanced. I tell myself I like the extra desk space, the exercise of walking to the computer lab once or twice a day, freedom from the cell that my email often becomes these days, overflowing with departmental duties and plaintive students. Really, I don't want to crawl under my desk and engage in the frustrating task of passing a power cord and ethernet cable vertically through a small opening, fighting gravity, balancing them long enough to stand up and pull them up the rest of the way. No mean feat, I promise you, all for the sake of a cordless desk and the value of a surge protector. I am not sure when this sacrifice will become necessary - at some point there will be papers to write and powerpoint to manage and I will grow tired of the daily treks to keyboards that I fear will make me ill. Until then I fear this will be sporadic at best, the composition window a patient patio, waiting for a tea party in the spring.
