Augustine: That we might sleep and dream.

Dear Athena,

It's the first snow. Long overdue. There's nothing overdue about snow. It is not the rain that comes in time to rescue the farmer from the drought. Snow arrives when the moment is right. It is my first day off from work for two weeks. Tomorrow is my surgery. Snow arrives in the front range usually in mid October, but this year, it was not till today, till November 17th, my first day away from work, that the landscape has gone from a warm and beleagured autumn, to a soft blanket of flakes. The world seems to sleep now. I wish I was in the countryside for this. This year winter feels like a fail-safe for the world. When, like in the fairy tale of sleeping beauty, we should all be killed, instead a sleep falls across the land. It freezes but it also preserves. I wish this year's snowflakes would land on the earth and bid us all asleep. That we would wake years from now, rested and anew. That our lives now might be a distant dream of another time and another age. We might wake a new people with a different vision of our world. That we may dream of exploring the universe in spaceships built for peaceful colonies, creating large choruses in which we sing through the streets as thousands and millions, building vast gardens that are leagues upon leagues in diameter in which we may spend days observing a hillside or mountain bloom, or any other number of wondrous dreams. And when we would awaken from our collective dreams, in which we remembered our humanity and imagination, we would set to work of creating all these things that we have dreamed for ourselves as a people. Our lives now would only be a vague concept of an "old age;" long ago, barely remembered, and happily forgotten with the melting snow.

The flakes melted at first on the smooth, warm concrete the moment they landed and then disappeared. They appeared as raindrops on a lake. The ground is cold now and they are accumulating. Translucent, but layering, the parking lot has gained a damp covering that is beginning to turn white.

+Augustine