No, this week’s column doesn’t have anything to do with singlewides, doublewides, nor Desi and Lucy’s film, “The Long, Long Trailer”(1953).

It concerns the brief “Preview of Coming Attractions” which preceded the “big snow” of last week by a day or so. A movie trailer is miniscule when compared to its main feature, and that analogy holds here.

I’ve written about the mega-snows (1960, Rowan County, and Boone), but this one concerns only a “dusting-incher,” since this kind often get short shrift when it comes to being written about. By the time this is seen, people might want to read about a snow which quickly came and quickly went.

That morning, I saw “white” between the window-blind slats, but not a penetrating light, like sunlight, but the solid, earthbound glow of snow.

While putting on gloves prior to going out, I had a fraction-of-a-second flashback (the positive kind) to my Red Ryder gloves, with their cuff-like extensions, which I wore in my very early years at Granite Quarry School. They weren’t very warm, but they were definitely “little boy cool!”

I noticed all sorts of tracks on the way to my car: bird, squirrel, fallen branches lying in their own “tracks,” and looking back, the “shoe-treads” made by me.

The usually invisible tracks of man and animal had become visible, like those left by the “Invisible Man” (1933) which resulted, unfortunately, in his being shot.

My windshield wipers and windshield washer fluid seemed to work, or so I thought, until “things” began to quickly cover up my view. These “ice growths” were “moving,” but unfortunately, so was I, my vision suddenly blocked.

These weren’t the feathery kind of ice crystals, but instead, opaque spheres with a little “dot” in the middle, looking kind of like an amoeba. I remember reading some scientists’ conjectures about the kind of life that may exist in the clouds of the “ice giant” planets like Jupiter and Saturn, and thought that this is what a pilot there would see impacting his windshield (before being splattered himself by the immense gravity).

My windshield soon warmed up to a “non-Goldilocks” temperature for that sort of “life,” and they ceased to appear.

The thought suddenly occurred that if some kind of “frozen life” were ever found on Pluto, it could possibly return to the planetary fold.

I later took a walk, after having been out on the road a couple times. I saw a myriad of animal tracks for just the few hours which had passed, most reflecting determination, but noticing one instance of “indecision” on the part of a bird. It had gone around in a complete circle, as we say “making a complete 360,” but I’m not sure if it meant his sentiments had really “done an about face,” or if he was no more than “doodling,” while making up his mind about what to do.

And like the bird, on my way back home I “met” myself in the snow (actually with my first step after my turn-around point).

But in all of the animal prints, I didn’t see any “feather-flapping, take-off” prints as I saw in the late 1950s as a child in the side yard of my boyhood home on the Old Concord Road.

Reflecting again on all those prints brought to light by the snow, an idea entered my mind. If every track made by every terrestrial and aquatic living thing (not just those few preserved dinosaur trackways in Texas, New Jersey, etc.) suddenly appeared, lined in “very permanent” magic marker, the imaginary lines on globes and maps would fade in comparison, every square inch of the earth’s surface becoming part of a track.

No one knows how many millions of footprints we have made in the places we’ve been during the course of our lives.

But there is something more complete, more memorable, more meaningful, more trackable, more countable than those footprints. It is our reflection, cast in the “pool-form” eyes of those who cared, and continue to care, about us.

And vice versa.