Footprints and tire prints are lightly stamped in the main drag and in the parking lot. The body shop and car repair men were up at dawn, the first in the downtown business strips to flip on the neon signs and open their doors. Half past seven now, they are under cars with black hands that didn’t come clean yesterday, already backing cars into spaces and pulling new ones into the bay, already taking direction from who could fix their own windshield wiper blades and change their own oil but prefer to come here for the car talk and to feel self-important in the most congenial way.

Once the automobiles are pulled inside, the doors on the garage bays come down so the snow can be seen falling fast and thin, but so strong as to overwhelm the windshields on the vehicles in motion. There is a beauty to a well-run shop, a repair place that is kept clean and the customers are welcome to watch the work be done, even if their opinion is discarded as quickly as the used oil. Most shops are places where grease stains can be trudged through the office, where fingerprints are left on countertops and cob webs and dust collect in the corner with old engine part stacks.

Excllence Auto is not a condemned place. Its proprietor is a soft-spoken man, whose demeanor is the same whether customers are lined up or the lot is empty. The front door is propped open in the summer time and the mechanic’s children sit at the small television stand and play with toys heaped into a large basket pushed to the side. Mostly they watch the cartoons that give a strange background music to the antics in the garage. Oil plugs are pulled, batteries are dropped in, carbeurators are pieced back togeter to the sounds of Wile E. Coyote stepping off mountain cliffs and plummeting to what would be anyone else’s death.

This morning, the snow is a strange contrast to the summer, an opposite to the usual heat that turns the parking lot tar scalding hot and keeps the kids from playing in the space around the shop. Everything in the downtown district feels collapsed. Shades are drawn though businesses are open – the owners wishing not to look out on the mess – and planters and sidewalk signs that are set out to capture glances from passing cars are pulled close to the store fronts. Any walk-in business that was hoped for today has been given up on.

Eventually the shades will be lifted and the workers drawn to the windows to watch the snow. Swirling as it comes down, as though it were poured through a winding funnel. Landing on ledges, in flower pots, bare bushes, the last good snowfall for the year, the clouds ringing out one final coat before they wash off to another winter another place on the globe.

Tomorrow, it will be burned away, but it will be Sunday, a usually hipeful day, though the stores close anyway, even the auto shop. Men go to church in this town. Believers or not, they go. They listen. They pray that God takes their families to heart, that he provides, and that not everyday is as slow as the one set before them.

In a few moments, the tree lines were coated, blotting out the tree branches as the only distinguishable landmark in the white-gusting snow. Small cyclones whipped across the frozen glass blades and the pavement, swirling under dimly lit circles cast from the lamp posts attached to the barn. Sub-zero temperatures had begun to bleach the asphalt in the afternoon before the snow fell, marked by long white streaks that had been blown into feathery shapes across the streets and parking lots. But now, with the ground covered, the gusts left sweeps where they’d cut the ground like an angled knife.

“This is the weather that would have sent us home from school,” I thought, and saw myself out on the snowy sidewalk, younger, warmly dressed and aimless, just happy that it was snowing and that there was no place to be.

One winter I’d gotten ready in a hurry, dressed in layers, and covered any exposed skin except the places around my eyes and mouth and went out to play and now, then finding himself there, it all felt anticlimactic. I felt lost. The cold wind and the warm hat and heavy hood kept my head slanted toward the pavement.

I stood in the driveway, slid my boots through the snow. The sound was amplified in the still air, returned to me by the house fronts that stood rigid and susceptible to the blowing winds. The sun had come out and the space above me was so vivid it was if there was a cord connected to a power source and someone had hooked the blue sky into it for the day. But the air was still blowing, rattling doors and windows, ruffling clothes, and watering eyes.

I was warm and I started to feel the outline of my body beneath the clothes. My toes were still cold under two layers of socks. Those were the days when I was able to experience life, before I became a backset writer who considered the world and recorded it. The warmth of house is preferable to me now, not the wet snow, and that might be the greatest travesty – the setback that keeps me from being a prominent writer one day: it seems that more frequently now the watching has become a suitable replacement for the living.