About thirty six hours before I sat down to pen this post the city where I live got hit by a small ice storm.
I mean, technically, the weather service called it “freezing rain” but after an hour of that particular meteorological event (whatever one chooses to call it) every outdoor surface had been covered by a thin, slippery sheen of pebbled ice that sent traffic into chaos, all but shut down the city, and left people like me walking their dogs shuffling along the glassy sidewalks barely able to maintain a vertical posture.
At lunch (when it was a bit brighter and bit warmer, but not any less icy) I took a photo of one of the boulders in a nearby park while I took the dog on yet another shuffling scoot around the same.
It was as if someone had encased the meter-wide stone in a perfectly form-fitting layer of cold transparent glass, sealing the stone into protective, icy case visible from the outside but unexpectedly cold and smooth to the touch.
What is your perspective on the culture of 2021?
For some reason when I sat down this evening to write a response to my daily December question, I thought of this stone covered in ice, locked away in a little bubble of glass-like protection, visible to anyone who walks by but isolated and encased in something that prevents, at least without some kind of force, change or interaction from the outside.
My whole world was covered in a sheet of ice for the last day and a half.
Everywhere I look there is a slippery film that lets me look through and under and into the world beneath. But all I can do is shuffle along and feel the cold, slippery icy that separates me from what I really want to connect with.
Funny, but the whole world — friends, family, people, everything — feels a bit like that these days, too.
Thirty one topics. Thirty one posts. Not exactly a list… but close. In December I like to look back on the year that was. My daily posts in December-ish are themed-ish and may contain spoilers set against the backdrop of some year-end-ish personal exposition.