varying degrees of light

If you're reading this, I'm sure you come to these words armed and braced to encounter a level of unbridled melodrama. If I may continue perpetuating this tone, if I may be so asinine and ridiculous:

There are a few times every year that I desire to introduce a turning point in my life. This desire is often large, and sometimes quiet like a whispered affirmation about a time of deliberation. And who can tell what prompts them? An image of snow, building up softly and pervasively across the fields, even blocking out the sun and one hopes that it comes to such a degree that not only would roads, work places and schools concede to its quiet tenacity, but electricity and heat as well. Those living in the Midwest have a few stories of such times, I'm sure, when the snow/ice/freezing rain/hail was so bad that year and we just didn't bother trying to do anything outside of our doors -- physically or digitally -- for a few days, until it passed through and we could assess the damage. Thank God for the wood-burning fireplace and all that. My story involves being blessed with that fireplace (as well as lots of peanut butter and beef jerky and the brothers returning home with a month of groceries just after the electricity went out.) I want that debilitation again, to shock the hourly/daily/weekly regressions of academia and established community and humble us to the point where, instead of working around nature, we are stilled to bear it.

And yesterday, the stories, notes, essays, pens, pencils and emails sat quietly in my bag and read through the pages of food blogs, the Momofuku cookbook, organized a series of spices next to a bowl of salt, quartered and cleaned a turkey, seasoned it and let it refrigerate for a few hours to let the juices draw toward the surface. I spent the day anticipating and preparing for a meal, excited in the overwhelming volume of food that a whole turkey brings and how will my roommates be fed? I spent the day preparing, consuming and reveling in that meal and the quiet slurping it brought. Oddly, this was one of the few suggestions for post-grad endeavors, offered in partial jest, that my parents were legitimately excited about.