Mailbag: Black Snow
a reader's line, monday morning. she shook it out twice.
Grinding started, and the mail changed. It does every October. For about three months the letters stop being about what people saw on the water and start being about what is coming down on their laundry.
"It is on the sheets again. Little black curls, like burnt paper, all over the line. My mother called it black snow and so do I. I am not asking you what it is. I know what it is. I am writing because nobody else I know thinks it is worth mentioning, and it is."
"I moved to Houston eleven years ago. Every October my sister mails me a sandwich bag with a piece of cane in it, and I open the bag and smell it and I am back in my mother's kitchen with the trucks going by the house all night. That is the whole letter. Thank you for still being on the internet."
"My husband works nights at the mill. From the end of September to after Christmas I see him on Sundays, and some Sundays not. People ask me if it is hard and it is. But I want to tell you about the hour after two, when the trucks stop for shift change and the whole road goes quiet at once. You can hear the frogs again. I wait up for that."
I have promised for years to publish only the ones that are left over. None of these are left over. DocFenwick, who wrote in before I asked, would like it on the record that the growers burn the leaves off the cane, that the ash has been called black snow from one end of cane country to the other, and that it is harmless to everything except a white truck and a clean sheet. Doc is right. Doc is right about all of it.
Here is my read anyway, and it is not a theory. Twenty Octobers in this basin and the thing I notice is not the ash. It is that a whole parish rearranges itself around a crop for three months and nobody calls it strange. Suppers move. Sleep moves. Sundays get shorter. A woman here mails a piece of cane to Houston so her sister can smell where she is from. I spend most of the year asking what the basin keeps. This month I am writing down what it gives.
Drive slow behind the trucks. Do not pass on a curve; they cannot stop and they will not try. Take the sheets in before the wind turns. And if you are waiting up for somebody, I hope the road goes quiet early tonight.
I relay. You decide.
In Truth and Terror.
— Beau
