Snow comes: it is winter. I burrow into my house, subsist on tea and soup and mittens. It becomes next to impossible to drag myself out of bed; even if I’m alone, it is so very warm and snuggly in my bed with my down comforter and the afghan my aunt crocheted for me two Christmases ago, my pillows tucked all around me and the light filtering in weakly though the window. I can see the branches just outside my room with their little blankets of snow, the sky white and luminous, all the world surreal. I try to get up: I turn on the light, start to sit up, but nothing doing, I fall back into the plush world of bed and dreaming.
But it can’t be, even though all my body insists. I have class today, class in twenty minutes now, and it takes ten to walk to school. Walk! Who could walk a mile in this? The wind is swift and the flakes falling fatly, wetly, they will soak through my jacket, they will soak into my shoes, they will gather in my hair and on my eyelashes and then suddenly I want snow on my eyelashes, I am propelled out of bed and into clothes (though I keep my pajama pants on under my Carhartts) and out the door. Snow!
Then once I’m out I can’t seem to get enough of it, and it falls and falls and falls, changing all the dull reality of town into sparkling, crystalline, frozen perfect beauty.
Back in the city, that winter, the snow when it fell was one of my only joys. You laughed at me every time, when I clapped my hands in glee and ran about like a kid. Or I suppose you were laughing with me, since I was certainly laughing too, delighting in the novelty and the beauty of it, my California childhood giving me no room for the casual disdain that some of our friends seemed to don. None of that cool aloofness for me, I was all innocent glee and shouting: Snow! Look! Snow! We made snow-angels and snowballs and snow-turtles (for lack of sufficient snow to make proper snow-men), and we drank hot chocolate and watched the steam. That first snow, that first year, is one of my very favorite memories.
I’m not sure when the darkness started to creep into me. I was happy there, at first, I know I was. Satisfied, even. Maybe content. I liked the city, I liked school. I don’t know: maybe I just like the novelty of it all, the thrill of living someplace new, doing something new, being somebody new. And then eventually, the thrill wore itself off, and I found myself in a bleak winter city, pursuing a goal I had no interest in, studying a subject I had no attachment to, hanging on to life by the smallest details: the shade of light in the morning, the shape of snowdrifts, the pattern of clouds.
Autumn had been alright. In autumn there are colored leaves and apples and brisk afternoons with sharp light casting full shadows. In autumn I could cling to the metaphor of change and focus on the future.
But winter. Winter came with its muffling and its freezing and its specter of death, and I just collapsed in the face of it. I tried so hard to pull joy out of the blank face of the winter-ridden city, but – aside from the snow, which fell only twice that winter enough to cover up the ugly – but there was nothing. I tried to hang my happiness on you, and you held it as well as you could; better and for longer than I had any right to ask, or hope, for.
So thank you for that. You gave me the courage to believe in my own imperative enough to leave; it is an irony, certainly, but nonetheless true. You awoke that dream in me, gave me that first vital validation that comes from the realization that I am not alone. That there are people – at least one person, but one for whom I have the utmost respect – who see the same things I do, who believe what I believe. And that knowledge gave me the hope that we might prevail; it gave me the motivation to pursue the dream that had become ours.
I won’t take that farther, here. You know the part that comes next.
Back then to the snow, here, today.
We went hiking, up the local mountain, slipping down the path on the half-melted snow, made dirty by our footprints. But everywhere we weren’t, all the hillsides and the pine trees were covered in an unbroken, unsullied expanse of white. When we got to the top, we gazed out at our little mountain desert town, transformed. Little wisps of smoke came up from the houses, and a haze obscured the peak across the valley, and every so often a clump of snow would fall from a branch behind us, startling us and making us laugh.
We picked up handfuls of it, packed them into balls and either threw them or ate them, depending on the mood and the moment. At the top of the trail, mostly ate them, although we knew that eating snow technically is dehydrating, but we were so thirsty: Even after a big wet snow, the desert air goes straight back to desiccating.
As we were walking home after our hike, we turned to look where we had just been. The peak seemed strange; there was a dark shape behind it, like a reflection in the sky. We stared and stared as the passing clouds passed, trying to make sense of the sight. We’d just been up there – there’s no matching peak behind the one we climbed. A little saddle, yes, and a lookout, but that isn’t what this shadow looked like. A shadow cast on the clouds? Makes no sense at all.
Eventually we gave up and walked on. There’s no sense in trying to explain the inexplicable. I think we sort of figured it was a mass hallucination, abetted by the strange hazy clouds and exertion. A while later when we turned back and looked again – just the hill and the lookout, in their usual proportion.
Nothing is what it seems, I suppose.
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