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This art featured in my memoir, Incandescence Rising Above Darkness is included as a moment of serenity between chapters and does not necessarily have any literal connection to the story.
Incandescence Rising Above Darkness Chapter #9 Saints And Snowflakes In Salina
When we left San Diego for Salina, Kansas, I did not know why. I imagined my father’s desire to escape himself was the reason we moved so often. Perhaps the sense of leaving everything behind comforted him. His constant urge to get away from his present reality seemed to be temporarily satisfied while moving at sixty-five miles per hour. He loved to drive long stretches without stopping and had an enormous capacity for it. I think while moving, he experienced a state as close to peace as he could. As we crossed Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, my father was almost serene.
Often the six of us would pile into the car at dawn, and my father would not stop driving until he was on the razor’s edge of unconsciousness. At precisely noon, his daily ritual began with opening a beer, which was replaced by another, and then another, so his left hand was not without a beer until he passed out. There were times he kept driving until he realized he was hallucinating, and other times, he did not know that what he was seeing was not actually there. I remember him driving until the early hours of the morning and saying, “Let’s sleep in this grove of trees.”
I said, “Good idea,” even though there was not a single tree in any direction.
Road trips could be surreal ordeals. My mother and I would silently work together. Sometimes she would see danger I did not and with one glance give me information that could not be voiced. I was the one in the family who could navigate the minefield of my father’s rage without stepping on a landmine. My mother would set markers to warn me where his explosives were buried. We were spies behind enemy lines. We learned a way to communicate secret messages so they would not be intercepted.
What did appear miraculous that winter took place outside our trailer one cold morning. On a piece of jet black tar paper laying on the ground, one after another, tiny miracles showed up. They were each sparkling perfection; an iridescent shimmer of frozen grace stunned me with its beauty. I examined every delicate thread, every minute point of the brilliant symmetry. As each snowflake appeared, I studied it closely, and indeed it was different from the one before. As another settled onto the tar paper and then another, my mind raced, trying to memorize each shape as they fell faster and faster. I tried desperately to match one to another while lying on my belly inches from the minuscule jewels.
Clare Cooley
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