Just to Be Out In It - Dec 18 2025

 

Just to Be Out In It

Dec 18 2025

Snow settles over the world,

softening its edges

and muffling its noise

under a thick white quilt.

All is still

as a blizzard barrels in

and arctic cold descends;

offices abandoned,

roads impassable,

and every shop shuttered

 — even the after-hours bars

and all-night bodegas.

The peace and quiet

is a balm to jangled nerves.

What we’ve silently been longing for

in this frantic world

of striving and precarity —

to be snow-stayed,

surrendering

to forces beyond our control

no excuses needed.

It’s as if time had stopped.

And for some, turned back, 

reverting

to giddy little kids

on a last-minute snow-day,

bolting from bed and charging outside

to play in fresh white powder

almost up to their waists.

Just as grown men

with important jobs and children of their own

brave the white-out, 

slogging through powder

and revelling in the snow

just to be out in it.

They’re like apartment dogs 

off-leash in the park,

porpoising through the drifts

with madly wagging tails.

Everyone

stopping the world and stepping off,

no one to answer to

time immaterial. 

That is, until the snow stops and wind dies,

the plows rumble past

spewing black diesel exhaust,

and a sober morning dawns

with its cold starts,

frozen car seat,

ice-encrusted windshield.