Flurries. A dusting. Clearly, it wouldn’t last. It wouldn’t stick. But a girl could hope, couldn’t she?
On autopilot. My smart keys unlocked my smart car - both, it seemed, smarter than I - as I neared her. Her because all vessels are her. Bianca, specifically because she is white like the snow, and tangentially because a Shakespearean character bears that name.
On autopilot, to get to the next thing and the next thing and the next. Until I looked down. Ostensibly to avoid sliding on the ice or tripping over the slick curb. What I saw made me downshift; pause.
The textured flagstone sat damp, darkened by the precipitation. The feeble snow struggled to eclipse it, but managed only to cover half of it in a jagged, haphazard way. It turned that particular slab of that particular walkway into an ephemeral sculpture. The stone a soot-gray foreboding sky; the snow a pristine, frosty mountain top.
A mountain. I stood at the base of this microcosmic one, and the metaphoric one I faced. With gratitude. Because while my real-life one was ugly and treacherous, this one at my feet was beautiful and its beauty suffused into mine. Because I knew, since the temperatures would soon climb into the mid forties, that this sidewalk peak would melt and disappear. As surely as Everest would, and as surely as the one I was about to scale would, too, eventually.