Not long ago, a dear friend sent me a black-and-white photograph of us skating in her parents’ back yard. They had a rink they set up with a plastic sheet, a sturdy frame of some kind, then water poured out which quickly froze. This was Upstate New York where the winters were harsh in the late 1960s, when this photograph was taken, and less so these days, or so I am told. We seemed oblivious to the cold, as children often are. We were about nine, trying to balance on our skates, trying to glide, trying to be free and full of bliss.
My childhood, in general, did not feature bliss but it did feature a great deal of snow. My last Thanksgiving in Ithaca—I moved away in the late summer of 1972—three feet of snow fell. That’s a lot of snow, a challenge to even the best prepared road crews. The winter before that it snowed about thirty inches in one storm, and I was instructed by my mother to walk to the grocery store with a list of basic supplies. The roads had been plowed but people were asked not to drive. I was maybe eleven or twelve. The store was just under a mile away, the round trip came to about 1.6 miles (I calculated this later), but I went. It was probably eight degrees out. On the way back, trudging along with my paper bag, a police officer pulled alongside me on his snowmobile. He wanted to know what I doing out there on my own. I explained I’d been sent on a mission. He ordered me onto the back of his rig, and off we went. When I told my mother a cop had given me a ride home, she asked what I’d done wrong.
It didn’t snow much in central New Jersey where I spent high school, but it snowed like hell in Boulder, at the base of the Rockies in Colorado where I moved in 1976. That’s where I learned about snow blindness, bright sun on wide stretches of white that, without sunglasses, made one squint until any view was impossibly narrow. In college my husband and I lived in a house at the base of a hill. When the snow fell, cars had trouble making the climb, and we’d go out and offered to push until their tires could gain enough traction to continue on.
Snow leaches color from the world. It softens, reshapes. It creates silence. Watching it fall and collect is amazing. As an adolescent back in Ithaca, after my father moved out, my mother went downtown to do some Christmas shopping. I watched television in her bedroom, which had a porch and railing visible through the window just beyond. The snow gathered on the rail, accumulated at the rate of perhaps an inch an hour, so that it was quite a bit taller when she returned than when she had left. I sat and glanced at it from time to time. A process that had nothing to do with me took place in my presence. I didn’t see then that this was an allegory of my life and my parents’ divorce, and the uneasiness I felt every single day. All I saw was snow. All I felt was that gradual accumulation of something I couldn’t influence.
Time passes as time always does. I moved to a part of the world where snow seldom falls. I refer to the Pacific Northwest, where if one lives at or near sea-level, snow is confined to the mountains. We do get the occasional snowstorm, and it causes no end of trouble for people who aren’t comfortable driving in it. Right now a huge storm is visiting a large swath of the country, leaving its cold mark. As a tribute to where I was born, snow featured prominently as a subject when I began to write poetry. Here’s a piece from my first collection, The Moon Won’t be Dared, called, logically enough, “Snow.”
snow falls
dusts
brushes
gathers
grows
builds
collects more
suffocates
deadens sound
sensibility
never fear, though
nothing deadens that
to look at the blanketed yard
street
town
state
country
world
and realize / remember
that every falling flake is
unique
distinct
sole
you wonder, during that
three-day storm
if somehow you
witnessed an
allegory of the human race
I don’t know if anyone caught in this storm will think about what they’re witnessing, except as another problem to be solved. Snow is surely that.
It’s also beautiful.