The cold snap broke sometime in the night. I didn’t hear it go — I just woke up and the house felt different. Softer. After weeks of that relentless, bone-deep cold that makes the walls tick and the pipes groan, the air had finally let go.
I walked outside this afternoon and stood in the driveway and listened. Nothing. Not a single sound. No birds yet — they’re still weeks away. No snowmobiles. No cars on the road. No rumble from the sandpit. No airplanes. No drones. No wind. Not even the distant hum of traffic that you don’t realize you’re hearing until it stops. Just silence so complete it has texture.
The snow is sliding off the roof in great slow slabs, the mountain of it piled halfway up the side of the house. The sun is different now — not just bright but warm, with that particular February quality that says I mean it this time. The air is clean and sharp and sweet. You can feel the turn coming. Not spring, not yet, but the promise of it. The first honest light after a long lie.
We’ve been in this little yellow house since October of 1998. We’ve had a line of golden retrievers — Buio first, then Izzy, now Blaze — and Blue, our black lab, who’s still with us. Twenty-six years of winters like this one, each of them hard in its own way, each of them breaking open into exactly this moment: the afternoon when the light shifts and the silence arrives and you stand in your driveway and think, yes, this is why we stay.
Absolute perfection in an image.