There is something about spring snow in the high desert. It comes when it wants to. It will snow when the sky is blue. I have seen it snow over only one hill. It has blown in, spiraling, like a glittering tornado, in front of my window when I lit a candle in prayer and once it fell upon the pages when I opened a book. It is different than a snowstorm and when I go out to thank the falling flakes, the tiny drops on my skin seem to bring what is needed as they melt, water from the sky merging into my body. It seems they most often whisper to Keep going and see what shall happen.
I awoke this morning, on this day in mid May, to see unlikely snow falling. I had a dream just before waking that when I moved through it awake, tears began to fall, hot to the cold streams trickling down the other side of my window.
What was this dream, you wonder?
I was on the ground, pulling weeds from a bed of warm and beautiful rocks next to a house I do not recognize. I turned to look behind me and I was at my grandmother’s, at the spot where as a child two horses and I watched one another. There was no longer a fence, and the horses were not there. Their little barn was dilapidated and grass had grown into the places their hooves had once imprinted the rich clay soil. ’Where are the horses?’ I cried ‘Can we bring them back? We must rebuild the barn. We have to bring them back’. A man in clothing of all white, down to his boots, stood next to me. I looked up at him, studying the turquoise and red beadwork all over what he wore, stitches of gold, animals and vines and flowers, his braid black like obsidian and as long as mine, with skin the color of the rocks I had been tending and hands that seemed a thousand years old yet were soft and new. There were no words between us but we spoke with our eyes. We are waiting for you. Come. He handed me a bracelet of silver, a small bottle of liquid, and a soft bristle brush. Paint the bracelet. As I pulled the brush over indentions in the silver, it illuminated with marks he had hammered into it. It is a map. Wear it over the vein that carries blood to your heart and you will know.
I recalled this dream while the snow fell and when I was finished, vision and weather mirrored the tears drying on my cheeks, vanishing.
