Joy

Do you ever wish you could take a motion picture of your experience for a few moments–what you see, how you feel, what you think about it–and share it with someone? Casually toss it across the room to them with a yell, not quite disdainful and not quite victorious but a mite gleeful: “Here, this is what it’s like!”

I’m sitting in a Starbucks on the East Side. Tiny snowflakes are blitzing down so fast, my windshield wipers weren’t keeping up on the way over. I’m gazing out these giant picture windows, past old men reading the paper over their coffee, out at the road and sidewalk and shopping mall. A Bobcat drives by to clear the sidewalk.

It’s the first hard snow of the season. Or maybe the second. Sunday had some, too. It’s like Winter snapped on. Saturday, it was 50 degrees out, and I couldn’t get enough of a breeze in the apartment. Yesterday, it was 11. All of a sudden, the car lights have grown dim in the driving snow, and the streets and vehicles have the remnants of scrapings and accumulated ice you expect when it’s been below freezing for weeks on end.

And it’s beautiful.

It’s the kind of beauty that’s so easy to resent and grumble about: inconvenient. Cold. Unwelcoming. Unwelcomed.

And today, in this moment of peace and rest, sheltered inside with a notebook and tea named, appropriately enough, Joy, I love it.