Winter Storms

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.