Through Time

These are the scatterings of the wind—hemlock needles, and fallen branches, and hive-shaped cones, all blanketed in snow. Our steps are strange and lumbering, and, above us, the sky is heavy.

It’s rain—the kind of rain that seeps out from tree branches and hillsides, the kind of rain that is somehow, in itself, green.

Down among the hemlocks, the light is slanted, and soft, and our footprints—wide, and bear-like—carve deep into the snow, so deep that we can see the translucent layers within them, all the fallen snow compressed and compacted, the oldest at the bottom, like rock strata.

This is deep snow, old snow, and it reflects back a perfect, pale blue, so blue that it feels like we are burrowing through glaciers, or wading through shallow mountain lakes, our heels sunk into the pebbled bottom, the sky wide and clear above us, all of time tucked somewhere beneath us, those many eons and decades and eras, ammonite shells and Australopithecus skulls, mammoth tusks and Meganeura wings, generations of bones pressed soft and crumbled into sand, all of it compressed by the weight of the earth, and then us, here, above it, the next layer, the next century, the next eon, the snow melting beneath our feet.