Snowfall at night
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow. My little horse must think it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, between the woods and frozen lake, the darkest evening of the year.
The well-known poem by Robert Frost has always held a special meaning for me, although not, I think, in the way it does for many. At the age of eight, my parents purchased a computer for me – one of the first computers ever built for the home, a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 1. This powerhouse of a machine had a processor that ran at a screaming 1 MHz, a massive 5 1/4" floppy disk drive capable of storing 720K of data, and a staggering 64K of RAM – the maximum that the Zilog Z80 processor would support.
It also came with a printed manual that I tore into like a starving child at an ice cream factory, and by the end of the first evening, following the instructions in that manual, I had keyed in my first program… one that drew little white dots slowly at random on the screen, as it displayed this famous poem, one line at a time, in the middle of the on-screen "snowfall," engraving Frost’s words into my memory, forever, just as surely as the computer itself altered the course of my life, forever.
Images of walking alone, peacefully, through a quiet, snowy wood at night have always been central to the deepest dreams of my heart. As, I should add, have images of being peacefully curled up with a laptop computer, happily typing away at whatever little project held my fancy at the moment. 34 years on, however, I live in a place with no woods, no snow, no quiet, and no peace… and although I do have several laptops which are like comfortable friends to me, they and I "get" to do very little, spending almost all of our time together doing work, at jobs which are highly unfulfilling, to say the least.
It is barely possible for me to even hope that someday I might be freed from the noise and heat of the barren desert, and that I might, while I yet live, find the home I have always longed for, and the life I have always wanted.
But, for now, I can only see them in my dreams, I cannot reach them yet… and I wonder when and If I ever shall. The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep… and miles to go before I sleep.
