The woods are full of snow. The wind is pushing the air across the big lake, and there it fills with the moisture of this vast inland sea. Then it dumps that as tiny flakes as soon as it reaches this cold shore.

I have driven through a scary night, 90 miles west from pretending to be an academic, watching cars and trucks slide when the "bridge freezes before roadway" and it has taken over two hours and two hands on the wheel almost the whole way with grim news flowing from NPR and the BBC, but the talk, it keeps me thinking and awake. Music might let me dream.

There are just eight hours before I need to head back the other way. I hate Wednesdays into Thursdays this semester. But first the dog and I run through the drifts that have swirled around the trees. The wind stings, the lights from the roads off in the distance have vanished, the sky is not there at all, just what falls from it as it crosses a narrow path of vision.

And yet, it is so silent. It is so silent right now. We are making the only footprints, and I can hear the crystals as they fall and strike the ever growing tide of frost.

Ira Socol