Snow Day...kind of

A snowy day should begin like any other, with poetry.

Along the last stretch of coast that day

We found the mournful, unwounded land we sought,

Stone-galled meadows fraught

With gorse, slopes of a headland running away

To embrace the downfallen moon

Of its valley, and the sky reflecting a sea

Like a stitched and thistled moor

The blues and slates of Donegal tweed,

Water the color of milk tea poured around black rocks

Gritty with limpets and barnacles,

Tresses of glinting kelp bound in torcs

Beaten from the supplest of submarine metals,

Found—and lost to the wheel and grind

Of downshifting stars. Lost. But found.

CA Snow

You remember being awakened to your first snow. You were eight or nine, the exact date isn’t as important or memorable as the event itself, snow was falling from the cold grey sky. The snow appeared like petals cast down from some infinite field of flowers in the far away sky. These are the sorts of inanities you can dream up as a child, and what a shame they don’t turn out to be true. You, and your two siblings played outside on your small patch of grass, now a shade of white. Someone, perhaps your mother made a snow ball, though you may be conflating this with another memory of a trip you all took up to the snow.

The real memory is not of the snow. It is not of the little flakes dusting the grass and the street in white, nor the thin strips that cling to tree limbs. The memory is of the incomprehensible strangeness of that snow. You were aware even then how out of place it was. How it didn’t belong? And this memory, leads to a congruency between you and the snow on the cold winter day, feeling the cold and wet stain on your pajamas and hoping that no one would notice that you once again had wet the bed. Years removed from that day, I can still call up the memory of those pajamas, of the thin flakes of snow, and the feeling of being alone, hidden.

Ann Arbor

I don’t remember the first snow in Ann Arbor. I just remember that it snowed a lot, seventy two inches our first winter there. We’d moved from CA where it snowed roughly once every ten years, and I believe the first time that I drove in a substantial snow in Ann Arbor I spun out in the car. It was less because I was inexperienced and more because the car didn’t cooperate at high speeds. I figured it was safest to drive fast and get off the wet and dangerous roads as quickly as possible. It’s logical, yes?

The day that I remember most clearly, was cold and sunless, like most days in Ann Arbor. It’s a beautiful place to visit. I recommend staying there for a weekend to anyone, you may just want to keep it under a week between the months of November and March. Anyhow, a gentle freezing rain was falling outside, coating the sidewalks and grass in a sheet of ice. I’m a terrible ice skater, awful at all balance sports, or I’d have just thrown on my skates and been like a young Katarina Witt coasting across the ice on my way to victory. However, I am not.

Instead, I remember trying to walk to work, which was slightly uphill, and not being able to get there. My feet would suddenly start to slide, (and I hear the voice of my mother reminding me of those Yack Track type things she got me, and no, mother, I wasn’t wearing them that day) and I’d wind up finding myself at the bottom of the small hill by the time they’d gained traction. I wound up walking to work in the small patches of grass that morning, crushing through the thin layer of ice to find some safe foothold. I arrived to work ten minutes late that day, and I sat in a cubical organizing admissions letters for people I didn’t know.

Maybe the thin ice on the grass is some kind of metaphor. Maybe it’s supposed to draw some sort of verisimilitude to the grander journey of life. Petrarch wrote a similar essay once about a mountain. Of course, the ice was not a metaphor, so it’s hard to convince myself to use it in that way. Maybe it was an obstacle, physical, emotional, spiritual etc. Or maybe it was just a thin sheet of ice, another grey and cold morning. Maybe life is a collection of such mornings and trying to attach something significant to any of them is a fool’s errand.

DC Snow

Stand at a window, and peer into the sooty light at snow falling. Do not think of the snow as an abstraction, some metaphor for time that has already passed. Snow reminds everyone who is watching it from windows of peace. When you have exhausted your sense of peace, make yourself some hot chocolate. Drink it slowly, savoring the steam that lifts like a low lying fog in some novel by a Bronte. And since you’re thinking of the Brontes, spend the afternoon of found time writing letters to people that you once knew. Write about the little things you miss, the slight indentation above her right eye, was it from a horse’s hoof or was it always there? You never got to know. Settle into the chair and listen to the wind whipping about the house. Do not personify the wind as anything other than the wind. If you do, you’ll wind up asking it a thousand stupid questions about the things that it has known. The snow is still falling in great white lumpy flakes, brushing against the windowpane like the smoke in some poem by T.S. Eliot. These are the trifling thoughts that flit through the mind as light through deep water. You imagine again that you are a little boy, waking to your first snow, stumbling out into the morning to greet it, such a small miracle amongst many.