The Wonder of It All

Sundays

Snowing in the West Village

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron, the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations.

The night was perfectly still, and the air so dry and pure that it gave little sensation of cold. The effect produced on Frome was rather of a complete absence of atmosphere, as though nothing less tenuous than ether intervened between the white earth under his feet and the metallic dome overhead.

--Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

Yesterday morning, out of the blue, I got an invitation to join two friends for breakfast at a lovely café in the West Village. I normally don’t do spontaneous get-togethers, plus I had a massive amount of work to do. But there’s always work to do, it was Saturday, after all—and it was snowing. There is something so fundamental and, since we don’t really get winter anymore, nostalgic about watching the flat-grey of the sky darken as the snow begins to fall. I wanted to be out in it and then have an unhurried breakfast and expansive conversation with friends who remind me, when I forget, what is essentially important—connection, community, and giving yourself permission from time to time to hang out with people you love without worrying about the rest of the world for a couple of hours.

On the way back to my apartment, the large, heavy flakes fell more steadily and one of the loudest cities in the world became hushed. When I got home, I lit a lot of candles and my wife and I sat on the couch as the pets slept nearby. The sky darkened and the quality of the silence made it easier to slow down and contemplate one of the most important lessons I learned last year, a new reality I’m still adjusting to: I will never go it alone again.

The first anniversary of one of the darkest days in modern American history—Donald’s second inauguration—is in two days. The next eleven months in the lead up to the mid-term elections are going to be difficult and fraught and stressful. We need to take time when we can. And make sure we don’t go it alone.