Waking up is never easy for me. My normal sleep cycle is skewed so far from "normal" that I struggle with it every day. I've trained myself to get up at 5:45 on weekdays, but it's never a pleasant experience (I'm not a morning person. Nor am I a night person. I'm more a five-random-minutes-in-the-middle-of-the-afternoon person.). Morning routines are a constant challenge for me. I get as much ready the night before as is possible. So why, I ask you, is there no button on the top of toilet tanks to immediately turn off the flow of water, rather than a cranky valve way at the bottom of the porcelain base, inevitably stuck in a permanent on position at the precise moment it needs to be easily turned to the off setting? These are the types of trials that make it so difficult for not-morning people like me.

It's snowed enough here today to make the roads treacherous, to coat the trees and make the evergreens droop, to camouflage the dents and dings in the world, and to frost the Christmas lights so that they glow through the whiteness. The snow is, as are most snowfalls in the east, heavy and dense and wet enough to be beautiful, with more of the same scheduled for tomorrow.

The non-stop flakes today made me think of the story Silent Snow, Secret Snow that I read back in junior high school (my school at the time was termed an Intermediate school, a mere way-station on the educational highway, neither the elementary school of childhood nor the high school of the surly teenager years). The story was made into a film or TV show of some sort, and both made my skin crawl. Not a horror story, except in the most personal form of horror. The thought of a mind that so badly needs to cut itself off from the rest of the world with a wall of snow was terrifying. Physical snow can always be dealt with in one way or another. But mental snow, the psychic equivalent of constant static, can strike anyone and there's no promise that spring will ever show up to melt it away.

That story made me think of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, another tale of terror. This one gets to the heart of social conventions that are repeated because "they've always been done that way". These traditions, such as they are, are intended to stave off some unnamed dread, but actually create a vein of evil so deep in the social fabric that it can not be rooted out. Do kids still read these stories? Mine have never mentioned either of these. Perhaps they are deemed too deeply affecting for young minds. Perhaps the fact that I remember these after more than 30 years proves that point.