My mother, gone six years now, loved it. She perked up when the flakes began to fall, “It’s schneeing,” she’d say, no doubt a throwback to her high school German classes. At art fairs the gauzy winter oil and watercolor scenes attracted her the most. I can still see the ones she selected hanging in a place she hasn’t lived for a long time. Whether through nature or nurture, she passed this love of the white stuff to me.
As I write, the television weather people have hunkered down at their Doppler radar screens and in front of the camera to scream sensationally about the likely accumulations: Twelve inches or twelve feet? Who knows, but everyone has raced out to Home Depot for ice melt and broad blue plastic shovels, and to Stop & Shop to stock up on, what? Oreos? I rarely shop and cook even less, but I could still survive for a week on what sits in my pantry. I understand if people need, say, infant formula, but for heaven’s sake, what is it about a snow forecast that sends us scurrying thus?
Last week it flurried. Maybe an inch accumulated. I donned boots and layers and marched out. “Why would you walk? It’s SNOWING?” some asked. As if said flakes were composed of hydrochloric acid that could burn through said layers and singe my skin. It’s refreshing to walk in the frosty precipitation, experiencing a healthy cheek-reddening chill while looking skyward trying to catch a flake on my tongue like a child.
Snow creates calm. Especially when pristine and untouched as it was when I walked, it is a quiet canvas full of potential. The few cars on the road drove in slow motion and sounded somehow deferentially relatively quieter. The white blanket seemed to dampen noises as it did the ground. My shoulders unhunched and my spirits lifted. It reminds me of the delight that I feel looking a blank page filled with possibilities, but without the anxiety. I had nothing to write in the snow; no need to be witty or concise or creative.
Before the traffic got to it and people trudged through it creating that ugly grey sludge, I saw delicate claw prints, and wonder who hopped around looking for sustenance under the thin white layer. Too big for a sparrow, yet too small for a crow. I pondered the question until I crossed the bridge where I watched the snow try to make a similar impression on the still moving river which thwarted its efforts to make it stick. The banks had just begun to freeze, so the flakes had some success there, but the bulk of the surface of the water remained stubbornly black.
I attended college in Middlebury, VT, where below freezing, and often subzero temperatures were the norm. During one particular January term it was so cold so consistently for so long that we feared frostbite, even on jean-clad thighs, at every foray across campus. But even then, I did not resent the flurries. They enabled us to ski at the nearby Snow Bowl and made for some almost unreal picture-postcard stills of the coated campus. I happily got to visit that nestled wonderland often years later when my oldest son attended. One particularly frigid evening, we walked together across the green downtown, the snow crunching underfoot in a way I’m certain it only does in Vermont. I had my arm in his – he allowed it as it was dark and none of his cohort was around – and we did not speak. Only that crisp crackle of crushed, tightly packed crystalline water broke the silence. When we’d traversed the diagonal path I told him how that unique sound evoked my time at the school, and how special it felt to share it with him.
When he agreed in recognition, I knew that he, too, had inherited the snow appreciation gene, and felt pretty sure that my mom, his Grandma Barbara, would be glad to know it.
So while some watch the forecast with trepidation, I quote Sammy Cahn and Jule Styne: “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!” It’s a far prettier reason than the pandemic to snuggle up, hunker down, and stay inside. Or, to bundle up and take a walk.