Rambling Snows

The first snow of the season always surprises me, although because I live in the north, the snow always arrives, sooner or later. It’s different if it comes in the early morning than if it comes at night. At night, the flakes give the impression that they are concentrating very hard on the ground, trying to erase the spiky green-brown of the lawn. They concentrate so hard, it seems they’re trying to penetrate the frozen soil, trying to dig into it, bury themselves. Of course this never happens.

I’ve seen many first snows, but am not sure if I’ll see one ever again; as the years go by, I think each one could be the last, but then I shake my head and deny such ideas room in it, because there are many more things to think about, all a lot more pleasant. More pleasant, if I can get to where I want to go with my thoughts. This year was odd, though. I’ll try to explain.

It is around seven in the evening and daylight withered about three hours ago. The streetlight sizzles in the pale, frigid air, then drops, its progress downward unbearably slow, frizzing outward before descending. It seems as if the slipping movement would make noise, but the most it produces is a tiny hum, like a bee in the rain, as a Portuguese writer once said. The streetlight makes the snow look like something white that is not wool or cotton or silk. It’s trying so hard to colonize the dead grass and stalks of former flowers, but it is too weak and scattered. I felt sorry for the flakes because they would not last long, not this time. However, I was wrong.

This time it’s something I cannot explain. The first snow is bringing with it every first snowfall I’ve ever watched, standing beside every window I’ve ever stood beside, and the flakes don’t just seem to be covering the ground: they’re covering me as I watch. Me, a little girl still fascinated by the color white, dusting across the black screen of night stooping to let it pass. A little girl who hasn’t yet learned to think in terms of first or last or in between because she’s in it, in the first moment, so inside it that she swims around the presence of all the colors - that’s what white is, as she will learn one day in science class. Swims, or maybe floats. Or crawls? I don’t know. Maybe I am doing all of these things.

Snow isn’t flour and it isn’t sugar, as some inept writers might say. It doesn’t deserve those tired images. It is under my feet, which are making a crackling sound still as I walk over the blades of grass that are still showing. I am walking toward the stooped darkness and am taking the snow with me. We are neither old nor cold; we are young tonight, and we are unable to keep still. We have to cover the world outside the window. That is why we move toward …

The first snow has melted into the snow that measured more than three feet in a lovely city in western New York. A white hammer over everything, glaring and gleaming at us, daring us to push it away. When the sun blinks, it creates an opalescent tomb for cars and bushes, curbs, windows on first-floor apartments. It feels to to be dead, I am tempted to say. But if I were, if we - the snow and I - were dead, then we wouldn’t have this frigid magnificence surrounding us. It’s just that the high white walls do have a resemblance to a coffin. That is undeniable. There are no streets and certainly no sidewalks. I see people walking on white like a certain biblical character walked on water. Or maybe this is not a tomb; maybe it’s the moon. Craters beneath my feet now, yes. 

Just when I am getting used to feeling like the Woman in White, which somebody else, maybe an Englishman, wrote about, I have disappeared. I am in a car creeping along a road that is the presence of all color with a carbon-colored blanket. Car beams, not sunbeams, guide me. Now I have lost the white road - a Galician writer has a nice poem about a camiño blanco, and it comes to mind now, although I didn’t know that when the road became a ditch and the car was in it. 

The white ditch has led to a farmhouse to stay overnight with strangers. The first snow is long gone. The blizzard is here and is even better, as far as I can tell. I am warm and listening to my snow as it falls on the field beside another window. A window I have seen for the first and last time tonight. I don’t know where I am, except that the world is white everywhere and is part of me, sheltered by a log cabin quilt. I am definitely not afraid and am not shivering.

I see fields and a lot of trees that might be a forest if I could see better. Between the black background and this white where I am quite warm and unafraid, I can only guess that it is, because this part of the state is fairly rural. I imagine that not to far in the future I will be thinking of this uncharted place and moment and will be remembering lines from the Frost poem everyone should know by heart. Whose woods these are I’ll never know, but I too love to watch them fill up with snow.

My white and I are huddled in a cave, further to the west from the ditch I mentioned earlier. It seems to be a cave, because it’s dark in here and I can’t see anything but the white stones it is made of. I know they’re not really stones, but the color is correct and so is the dark that won’t let me see anything. Now I know: I’m in a fort - igloo? - my friend and I built on what, in summer, is my front lawn. It is dark and white, but we are safe because this is home. My home. My safe home. Its once-yellow paint has faded or weathered to nearly white. Warm white. And the fort or igloo is warm. My friend and I want to camp out here tonight, but we were told kindergartners cannot do things like that, so we’ll wait a couple of years and ask again.

I am here now, looking at the presence of all color that covers every surface and thinking how it looks like skin, like my skin, which is warm but does not melt. Little by little the story of The Lost Steps (Los pasos perdidos) is drifting into my thoughts, but this is not the Orinoco River in Venezuela, so I have to push that story aside and try to find my way. There does seem to be a storm coming, as clichéed as that sounds. I’d hate to get lost now that I’m so close.

[BLANK]

We are finally together. No inside. No outside. Just all together. We who are snow that is seen by the person who knows and watches it. Beside a window, from a ditch, under a quilt, strolling through a huge, gelid tomb. We are here and unafraid. That is because we understand that when there is a first, there will be another after that, which will be the last. Which is fine, because we are back here at our source, and are quite comfortable indeed.