It snowed last night. Not the fluffy, dry snow that is easily removed from driveways and sidewalks, but the heavy, wet snow that sticks to tree branches, even the smallest, skinniest of branches. It makes looking outside at the trees feel like you’re staring at an Ansel Adams photograph, you know, everything black and white with lots of clarity, depth, and contrast. Very nice to look at. Quiet. Serene.
But looking outside, I also see the potential problems with this type of snow. One primarily being, that this is the exact type of heavy, sticky snow that can cause branches and power lines to snap, resulting in severe injuries and even death (from falling branches) and the indefinite loss of television and computers due to power outages. I’m not kidding about the death part either. Several years ago, during a particularly heavy snowfall, there were a few people killed by falling branches in NYC’s Central Park. Of course, being killed in Central Park is just a part of living in NYC, and something you should always be aware of, and prepared for, should your number come up one day.
Anyway, I find that looking at the snow, on the trees, outside, makes me contemplative about lots of things. Like today, I’m thinking about how I always have a “noisy” mind, I really can’t sit still for very long and have racing thoughts about innocuous things that make my head spin. For example, after waking up, I looked down at my shoes at the foot of the bed and I thought about how I always line my shoes up perfectly. Always. All “left” and “right” shoes must be next to each other, with the tips pointing perfectly straight out and the soles of the heels of all the shoes within the line up touching their “neighbors” as best they can for the entire length of the shoe — heel to toe. I also find it necessary to do a similar thing with other objects that I place on a desk or a dresser at the end of the day. Things need to be lined up, only this time, not touching, but equidistant from each other and always, always in a perfect line.
So I’m wondering now, “Do I have OCD?” No, I say to myself, it’s not like I’m Jack Nicholson in “As Good as it Gets” — the movie in which he plays an author with severe OCD, and needs to turn the lock in his door 3 or 4 times, back and forth, back and forth. He does the same thing with a light switch in the movie. Before leaving a room he turns the light off, then back on, then off, on, off, on…… His character is also obsessed with cracks in the sidewalk and must avoid stepping on them in such a way that he appears as though he’s playing some bizarre game of “Twister,” weaving this way and that while hopping over the cracks as he weaves.