Constant Pain.

I'm falling down on the job. I knew it would snow, and I did not tell you. Or: I knew they knew it would snow. What to say about this: when I got out of my car at the deeply crappy and still utterly satisfying pizza joint way out US 70, out near the puppet show, it was snowing hard, but it smelled like rain. This is how you know only to worry about bridges and side streets. Or surface streets, as they may be called. Surface streets. Find me another kind. But I digress.

It was at first a deeply lovely snow, large-flaked, noisy on the umbrella, something to look at out the classroom window or through the windshield. It has this evening become a more pelleted type of situation, accumulating all the same, though not on streets of any kind, surface or otherwise. It is a free snow, the type that lets the kids out for no reason, throws wrenches in the works, makes messes of everything but the actual.

Here at 27401, we build Swedish sofas, we make dinner, we look out the windows, we forget that the faulty stove burner fails on low, and we then have to leave the kitchen windows open until the threat of immolating explosive death and injury passes. We watch it snow. We welcome March. This isn't lionish, I don't think. It's snow, though, and it's winter. Still. Again. As always.

Friends and fans of weather of all kinds, Barry Hannah has passed, which is its own storm. I am the dragon, Quadberry says, stepping from the fighter plane on the tarmac in Testimony of Pilot. America the beautiful, he says, like you will never know. If I'd written that story, I'd have never written another. How in the hell could I have found that again?