A Flurry of Moments

This photo shows you nothing that would tell you what happened that day, or what was happening as the moment was captured, but if you know the story it shows you everything.

Our moments fall around us all the time, they never come alone. They thunder like summer rain during a storm, or drift by like snow, but they never come (or go) alone. At the end of a long day in the heart of January, we stumbled from the pub in a mess of words and laughs; there were four of us, then, and we're mostly scattered now, but when I look at this photo I can hear them. I can reach out the tendrils of my mind and almost touch the moment.

I can unspool that whole day like so much ribbon from the inky dark of the morning and the smell of tired bodies in the warm, quiet car to the sun rising over Loch Lomond. I can take you down the pathways of memory to the Church in Dull where we had that snowball fight and I got to be a child again. I can almost take your hands and help you feel the rumble of the road and the scary looseness of the wheel. Ice, thick sheets of it like frosting on the back road where there was no tree cover, nothing to keep the whipping wind off of our backs after we slid slowly, slowly, gently into that small ditch.

And if you look at the flurries of snow, you might see cold but I see Graham, the park and wildlife ranger who towed us from that sticky spot and herded us like lost lambs to the main road where we gathered our courage like so much cloth and turned north again anyway. All the way to Loch Ness where we stood barefoot and shaking in the biting water said to hold a monster before turning southward to home.

You can't see how my friend, the only passenger not sleeping at this point, spoke quietly and consistently to me as the flurries became a blizzard three hours from home and we, in a little tin can, crawled through the maw of Glencoe. But I can show you, I can show you how the calm quiet bulk of a friendly heartbeat can coach you to stillness when panic grips.

What you can see is the end of the story. Home safe and warm we made our way to the pub and ordered chicken to share at a round rickety table to small for us all and decided to part ways before midnight. You can see that when we stepped into the street, we realized the snow had followed us home, clinging to our coat-tails, and we laughed because in the yellow glow of streetlights it loses its teeth.

In this picture you can see that the cold has no bite when you're drunk, fatigue has no power when you're happy, and a disaster loses its menace when you're with friends. You can see all, if you look hard, but you won't see the deeper truth; this is the moment I realized I can be brave. All I needed was a little help from my friends (how does that song go again?).

And if you look closely and carefully at the middle of the photo, you'll see a stop sign.... and behind it, the pub we went to next, because our moments weren't done falling yet and there's no such thing as common sense when you're six pints down and laughing at your friend for falling on their arse in the snow... even if they almost dragged you down with them.

What, you thought I made the picture blurry for artistic effect?