Watching snow melt…

July 10th, and on our way west from Iowa, Wyoming’s Big Horns are the first of the big mountains to scratch the horizon, the highest, Cloud Peak among them, syruped with snow.

And the next day, along the Beartooth Highway bridging Montana and Wyoming, at, what, 10,000 feet, snow banked at the road’s edge to 10 or 12 feet, names carved, graffiti-like, in the walls, those walls of snow, the names of wife Karen and daughter Siobhán now among those many names, and likely there for weeks, if not months, a year, memoriam.

By the time we had rear-viewed Yellowstone, snow was, however, passé: we had seen it, walked it, even, in July, formed and thrown snowballs.

And then came Montana’s Paradise Valley, snow still drizzled across ranges east and west, every last river and stream all but riotous with run-off.

And me outside a cabin, this cabin, in that valley, there in the sunlight, watching snow melt.

Someone, the old line goes, has to do it, so why not me?

And, given, I’m told, that the snow on one nearby ridge has not melted in three years, this could well be a full-time job, one, even if I’m not yet qualified for, I might grow into.

Doing little more this.

Little more than watching.

Watching what has year after year unfolded, decade by decade, century after century.

Winter at last relaxing, unpacking kit and case, drop becoming dribble, dribble a trickle, trickle a rivulet, rivulet to run to creek to river. And, by August in Montana, kids from bridges leaping, those rivers at last tamed by summer, summer already languid, languid with the imminence of fall.

But back to watching snow melt.

Think of that now, this moment, whatever else you might this minute be doing.

Because there is, even now, snow melting, not all of it seen, let alone under anyone’s careful scrutiny. If not in the Rockies, then the Pyrenees, the Andes, the Alps, the Urals.

And someone—you, even—should be watching, watching snow melt, watching life happen, watching time, time itself, those seconds become droplets and on to rivers, to bays, to the ocean of life itself.

And your hand, your one hand, the rest of you maybe now, maybe making love, that one hand, though, liquid in the sunshine, catching what cannot, not now, not ever, be entirely caught…

© 2011 by Dónal Kevin Gordon