Some Thoughts on the Weather: Snow stories

In the form of a geography lesson

In passing, “She can’t wear a coat like that! We live north of the Mason-Dixon.”

It is my opinion that the weather is relatively mild. I try to convince people of it. I speak to them at bus stops, or in line at the grocery store. I say that things aren’t so bad this year.  I comment on the average low and highs, I use the phrase, Mid-Atlantic. I speak of it without ceasing, as we are supposed to pray. I am highly in favor of this view of things. It has always struck me that my opinion had the weight of truth.

However, I am not so intemperate in my thoughts as to deny the possibility that the weather is not always mild. I suspect that if I were spending the evening huddled beneath boxes of cardboard beneath a bridge, with the city in the grips of a winter storm, the weather would not be considered mild. Perhaps, now that I've had time to mull it over, the weather is not mild, despite it being in the Mid-Atlantic.

After the snow has fallen, trees sheathed in crystal, sidewalks, like hollows, I sit with my thoughts and the ice creaking in the trees. I did not ask you to walk across the rough strewn ice to meet me by the frozen river. I did not ask you to write letters to me from your cabin far, far away, beyond the white and drifting snow. I would speak with you of anything, cherry trees, Christmas movies, or the red birds that peck ceaselessly at what must be grubs. I did not ask you to move across the river, but your window is dark, and the night is more like a wolf than a lover, let us speak no more of the weather.

As an Expert

Everyone is an expert on the weather. It's an easy thing to be an expert on, I suppose. All that one need do to ascertain the temperature is step outside. Such easy access to knowledge is rarely a good thing for our species. We do far better when we are unsure of ourselves. No doubt one can appeal to Columbus, who landed in America by heading for India. Surely, he encountered along the way, a storm or two, waves cresting in the green sea, crashing on board, the likes of which he’d never seen before. And yet, I assure you, on that journey, there must have been two sailors strapped to the masts, trading tales of storms just like it they'd suffered through in the past. "Well," someone will always pipe up, "this is nothing compared to where I'm from." If you are from the North Pole, then I have traveled to interstellar space. 

I am, in direct contradiction to my opening, no expert on the weather. Whether the ground is brittle and cracked by cold or warmed by the heat of summer, I stay indoors. I am scared of so many things: of the spaces between words, the sunlight, dappled by the elms, of the fat red birds that sit on white strips of branches like kings, of the rough shaped virus that Columbus carried across that same sea. "What does it feel like?" the friar asked one of the natives, blistering on the floor, "Hot," he replied. "It burns," Referring, perhaps, the father wrote down in his notebook, to the unseasonably warm summer.

First Snow or Frosty the Snowman


The first time I saw snow was on a postcard from my great uncle. The post card depicted a small village in the Italian Alps, a place my uncle had stayed briefly after the war. The card showed a small white spired church in the foreground, cupped in the hands of an emerald green valley. What caught my eye though were the thin white trails that ran through the ridges and lees of the mountains in the distance. I remember that the mountains in that card loomed, and I had the distinct impression of the power that the mountains and the snow had in the picture, that nature, not the small church in the foreground, ruled the scene. It's an impression that you lose as an adult, mired in cities, in offices, at desks, watching pebbles of rain fall on sidewalks and cars that something greater exists just outside the frame.

As the years went by, and I got older, I moved through different towns out west, married twice and then moved away. We always stayed in warm places, my wives and I, though never all of us at the same time. And somehow, I never managed to see even the slightest bit of snow but in pictures of eastern cities with ash grey snow pushed against curbs and everyone looking hurried. I would wonder, sometimes, thinking on that first snow, what snow tasted like, what it felt like to hold in your hands. I knew that it was cold, but I could not imagine how cold. As you know that a kiss will be electric, but you cannot know it fully until your lips arrive.

"Have I missed something by not seeing the snow?" I asked my third wife, as she bent to unload the dishwasher. Anne was from Colorado and had grown up with snow on her door step, snow on the eaves of houses, snow in the wash, puddling and canceling school. 

She didn’t answer. We were going through a rough patch then. Though life was a series of rough patches with me, or so I’ve been told. Years later, when she too was gone, I took out my meager life savings and traveled down south to the Andes to get my first look at snow. I slept through the flight, intent to catch the snow for the first time in person.

 At the base of the trail, a group of the younger hikers are telling jokes, passing time before we climb. I want go to and be among them, to laugh and tell jokes, but I can see now that I’ve grown old without intending to. This body is only a shell.

On the way up towards the city I have to stop for air on more than one occasion. Women who I’d once have tried to make love to were next to me, holding my elbow, asking me if I was all right, while I gasped like a dying man.

At the top of any mountain you experience a bit of euphoria and thus goes the saying. While everyone was meandering into the ruins, listening to the guides description of the crumbled walls of this ancient city, I made my way towards the snow. It was exquisite to feel and hear it crunch beneath my feet. And when I picked it up, it was colder than I could have ever imagined. And I saw, what all of those tossed aside in my past must have seen or known about me, all this time I thought I’d never seen snow that I could never understand it, and yet, I was composed of it.

I could have died that day, happily, up against the avalanche of blue and big sky. But life doesn’t turn on our whims. Here I am instead, pushed about in a wheel chair and told to look at the birds. A cardinal bends his head down and pecks at a cold piece of sidewalk, chipping away. I point towards him and grimace, but the nurse interprets it as a smile. “Yes, Raymond, that’s a Cardinal.” I want him to leave the ice alone, to let it stay sharp and clean through winter. The ice over the moving water is only dangerous when you try and chip it away.