everything is soft and sweet

Three indelible images of Oregon's strange winter beauty.

Sunday night a few weeks ago, I walked through the sodden backyard to the alley, arms weighed down with two bags full of recyclables. We tend to take care of trash-night chores late, and it was a misty, quiet night lit with the eerie purple glow of city lights smothered in low clouds-- the kind of light that, to me, is a visual representation of saying the word "hush."

It's already a bit magical to have an alley behind the house. They're rare in this young-built city, a little dangerous and ragged, a semi-hidden no man's land. The alleys of my neighborhood are byways for local dog-walkers, feral cats, and homeless people trolling for redeemable cans. I imagine their unpaved potholed lengths and unkempt verdant thorny borders to be the modern equivalent of myth's shifting paths to faeryland.

At any rate, the view down our alley often mesmerizes me, but this evening went above. Bent over the bright yellow rain-slicked recycle bins, a sense of blooming movement made me raise my head. In the eerie purple sky-glow, great cottony cumulonimbus issued from just beyond the end of the alley. The birthplace of clouds, I thought, in awe. Then came the soft hoot of the special steam engine train, whose gentle lowing we had heard all evening from within the house. It's a much warmer sound than the other trains, and between that comforting sound, the hush of low-ceiling clouds, and the issuance of great clouds so nearby... I was reluctant to turn inside, despite the steady rain. Indeed, when I returned ten minutes later with the trash bag, no trace remained of the steam train.

***

My first day back at work after my illness, I was still a bit in that far-off headspace. I parked my car and walked through the parking lot. At the edge of the lot, the wind picked up for a moment, and the sound of winter surf poured through the bare tops of the stand of birch trees there. I stood stopped still, and gaped. The sound, the movement, the sway of waves. It was so beautiful in the barren grey of winter that I knew I would remember the moment for a long time to come.

***

Driving up the west hills on the day after xmas, on the way to work. Suddenly visible through the mist, the top spread branches of tall fir trees are dusted with snow. On up the hill, this snow cover creeps lower and lower down the trees, so that in effect there is a horizon of white, an altitude line past which everything is shouldered in white. A literal snow line.