Marlene knocked at six-thirty this morning with a Carhartt over her nightgown, a flashlight tucked under her chin, and a quart mason jar she’d scooped off our front step around three. She held it up to the porch light and said, “Look at it, Brooke. Just look.” Then she tapped the side with her thumbnail and the bottom inch swirled.
So that’s how my Saturday started.
If you’ve ever let a jar of fresh storm snow melt down on the counter, you already know what she was showing me. Clear water on top. Soft gray slush in the middle. And then a band of dark, fine sediment along the bottom that doesn’t really settle so much as it sort of breathes when you set the jar back down. Marlene has been doing this since the December dump and the bottom is always the same color. She lined three jars up on her windowsill and labeled them by storm. They look like a flight at a very depressing brewery.
The girls in my Facebook group (Atmospheric Fallout Moms — Mid-Atlantic Chapter, we split off from the national page after the chemtrail people got bossy) have been talking about this all week. The official line from the weather app is “winter precipitation,” but anyone who has actually held a January snowflake up to a window knows that’s a marketing word. A flake is a tiny parachute. Whatever was airborne over Ohio on Tuesday is now in my driveway on Saturday. My sister-in-law Renee, who works the front desk at a pediatric ENT and is basically a nurse, said they’re already seeing “winter cough” cases and three of the moms in the waiting room used the word “particulate.” Unprompted. That’s a data point.
Cleo wanted to make snow angels the second she saw the yard. I said sweetie, wait. Marlene said wait. We compromised: Doug shook out the painter’s tarp from the barn, and Marlene climbed up on the woodshed at first light and scraped a clean top layer off the cedar shake, which she swears is “already filtered” because cedar is naturally antimicrobial. I am not totally sure that is how filtration works but I also wasn’t going to be the one up on the roof at sunrise. Cleo got fifteen minutes of supervised angels in shed snow and came inside with cheeks the color of a beet.
Speaking of beets — the Buncombe County road crew is now salting with a brine that’s calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, and beet juice. They call it “eco-blend.” Marlene flagged down the plow guy at the four-way stop and asked if she could smell the tank. He let her. She said it smelled exactly like the salad bar at the old Ruby Tuesday in Hendersonville, which closed in 2019, and I don’t think she meant that as a compliment. Beet juice sounds wholesome, but it is a food-industry byproduct, which means it’s basically whatever was left after the actual beets went somewhere with a better marketing team. That brine ends up on Cleo’s snow pants. Then the snow pants come inside. Then they go on the radiator. I’ll let you connect those dots.
The chickens have stopped laying. Marlene’s theory is the storm snow on the run roof is leaching down through the hardware cloth into the waterer. My theory is it’s nine degrees outside and they are unionizing. We are testing both. I put a piece of unbleached muslin over the waterer (filtration, see above) and Marlene moved her three jars onto her chicken coop windowsill, which I think is just for vibes.
One bright spot: cold weather is incredible for sourdough. The bulk ferment slows way down, the lactobacillus has time to actually develop, and you get that deep, almost yogurty crumb you cannot fake in July. Time isn’t an ingredient, so the loaf is still technically a two-ingredient bread. I pulled a boule out at noon that had the best ear of my life. Storm gifts.
Marlene is going to let the third jar settle for another forty-eight hours before she takes it to the guy at the rock shop who has a stereo microscope. The bottom layer, she reports, is still moving. Cleo asked if it was alive. Marlene said “not in the way you mean, baby.” I am choosing, for my own wellness this weekend, not to follow up on that.