On Snow

Boxing Day 2022.  As I write this, I am boxed in, stuck inside the house thanks to a couple of inches of new snow that fell this morning, topping off a layer of ice that’s been with us since Winter Storm Elliott moved in Thursday night.  The temp hasn’t risen above freezing in the three days since, and the Weather Service has dialed back the expected high for the day to precisely 32.  Between the temperature and yet another band of snow that has popped up on the radar and should be upon us within the hour, there’ll be no melting today—just more wind, more cold and more snow.

Being trapped in a warm house, winter kept safely outside the window pane, is hardly a hardship.  We have electricity—the rolling outages TVA mandated to keep the grid intact during the worst of the cold Friday and Saturday are, for the moment at least, over—and we have plenty of food and, thankfully, alcohol to see us through.  What we don’t have at the moment is internet.  (Q: So how did I publish this?  A: Very slowly via cell phone hotspot.)  The jolt of reawakening from one of the aforementioned outages Saturday morning proved too much for our cable router; the heart that pumped wireless faithfully through our home for the last three years beats no more but sits, disconnected and very dead, on the dining room table, a cold, black, plastic brick.  We’d planned to go pick up a new one today, but the weather had other ideas.  Two inches of snow doesn’t sound like much, and if it were just snow, we might have chanced it.  But snow on top of ice is a recipe for potentially spilling my thin southern blood, and while I hear freezing to death is not such a bad way to go, I’m not sure from whom that expert testimony has been gathered.  Call it cowardice or call it smarts, I’ll stay in and not tempt fate. 

There is snow on the roads, snow on the fields, snow on the limbs of the bare trees, snow on the rooves of the houses across the valley, muting color and turning the world grayscale: sky dull silver; tree trunks marengo, their branches slate; neighbors’ unlit windows lifeless black; the rest of the world white as a pearl, gleaming and hard and precious.  Whenever snow falls, I am six years old, whatever passes for soul joyous with the prospect of a snow day—until I remember I am closer to sixty than to six or sixteen and that (a) thanks to the internet, there’s no such thing as a snow day anymore for anyone and (b) slipping on this shit could break something—leg, arm, neck, head—I don’t want broken.  Still, a sort of capital R Romance lingers: sleigh rides, snowcream, cocoa, chestnuts roasting, St. Bernards with brandy casks digging you out of an avalanche.

If the ground stayed white from November to March, the fire of that torch would have sputtered out long ago beneath a wall of slush and yellow ice.  I like to think that, if I lived in a place where winter is measured in inches, I would still be able to appreciate the quiet beauty of a blanket of untouched snow beneath a full moon, but as for the day-to-day of that life, snow would simply be routine, not Romantic.  I would have a closet full of snow pants and parkas, drawers brimming with scarves and gloves and Thinsulate-filled mittens.  I would shovel the sidewalk and driveway and wait for the snowplow to run so that I could drive to work or the store on tires wrapped in chains.  I would not marvel at mountains of grungy gray ice piled in parking lots, nor would I hesitate to walk the dog around the block in boots warm and waterproof.  I would be accustomed, as it were, to snow’s face, downright inured to it, paying it as little notice as I pay the coworker I grunt at when I pass them in the hall.  It would be just part of the scene, not the scenery.

But snow is rare enough here for it to be an occasion, a holiday from the norm—which, in the current instance, happens to coincide with an actual calendar holiday.  I haven’t looked at stats to support this, but it seems to me that most winters had more snowfalls and greater accumulations when I was a kid than most “adult” winters.  I certainly remember being out of school for three days or even a week at a time at least two or three times a year when I was in elementary school—and I remember going to school well into June, bitterly resenting the hellish weeks of makeup time that cut the long-awaited nirvana of summer vacation too, too short.  By day three of one of these snow events, my mother would harumph that the roads were clear before grudgingly acknowledging that the rural roads in the county were probably still icy, too icy for the buses to safely run.  Had I had a hyperactive seven year old who wanted to go outside and play “ball” with the dog again (poor critter never could figure out where the heck that “ball” went; he'd run to the crater where the snowball had landed and pull out a mouth full of snow then look at me like “what the hell???”; I am embarrassed to say I loved to do this to him; I am even more embarrassed to say I would unhesitatingly do this to our current dogs and still laugh my ass off) thirty minutes after I’d just divested them of coats and gloves and toboggans and into warm indoor clothes after their previous outing, I, too, would have I longed for “city” schools that were open even if “county” schools were not. 

Growing up when and where I did, snow was pretty much pure pleasure—something familiar yet rare enough to make any day a special day.  When I moved to Chicago for college, snow became something else.  Quotidian.  More to the point, a pain in the ass.  I remember slogging to class through snow so deep it rose above the tops of my knee-high boots then wriggled down my pants legs, melting into my jeans and socks so that I sat through physics lectures with cold, wet feet dreaming of the warm, dry clothes awaiting me in my cinderblock dorm room that was otherwise about as luxurious as a prison cell.  It’s hard to focus on electromagnetism when all you can think about is electric heat.  Maybe this is why I am not an astrophysicist.

When I resumed my college career one year later and much nearer home—well, home, in fact, as in the house where Mom and Dad lived, the same house I’d lived in since the age of two—the frequency of snow decreased but its pain-in-the-assedness increased in direct proportion to the distance between me and school.  I could only walk across campus if I could drive to it, and I can’t remember a single undergrad class ever being cancelled due to snow.  I drove the twenty-five miles there and back again clutching the wheel with a death grip while silently chanting “turn into the skid, turn into the skid” with every breath as if my life depended upon—which, now that I think about it, it sort of did.  One morning, I had poked my way from the house to the stop sign at the top of the hill only to find myself sliding off the road with the first tap of the brakes.  I somehow managed to stop the slide, and some guy got out of his car and basically held the side of my car to keep it from going into the ditch while I executed a right-hand turn.  No idea who that guy was, but I think of him every time I face down a snow-covered road, thanking him and hoping he’ll pop out of the ether should I need his services again.

Ten years later, I left my apartment in that same college town to visit my folks in that same house for Christmas.  While I was there, the weather went to hell in a handbasket: rain became sleet became snow.  I should have left before dark, but I didn’t.  It was nine o’clock before I climbed into Dad’s pickup truck (my car was in the shop, and he’d loaned it to me until the repairs were complete) and headed up that familiar road.  I made it past the stop sign on the hill without incident.  I made it up the twenty miles of federal highway without incident.  But less than a mile from my apartment, incident.  When they say “bridge ices before road,” they are not kidding.  At the very spot the bridge began its arc above the earth, I began my arc across it, time slowing down in that crazy way it does in accidents to provide a terrible clarity as you wonder if you’re going to die.  I remember very clearly telling myself to “turn into the skid,” and I felt the truck right itself and point its nose forward.  Yay!  That had worked.  And then I felt it start to skid the other way, and no matter how hard my hands tried to obey the brain that was yelling at them loudly and repeatedly to turn into the fucking skid, nothing they did worked, and there I was, ice dancing across three lanes into oncoming traffic until the waltz ended with the truck slamming into the concrete of the bridge on the opposite side of the street.  I was unhurt (can’t say the same for the truck), and miraculously I had not hit any other vehicle as I executed my crossover turn, but the police officer at the scene, who was otherwise a nice enough fellow but in this a real bastard, would not stop traffic to allow me to turn the truck and head toward my apartment but made me, instead, drive back the way I had come, turn around in a parking lot and then start up the bridge toward my apartment yet again.  It was probably being pissed at him that got me safely over that damn bridge the second time, but I did make it across, and Dad was more relieved I was alive than upset about the truck.  Whew.

That incident left me with a healthy respect for ice and snow that served me in good stead a few years later.  I knew a major winter storm was headed our way, but a meeting ran long at work and I couldn’t get away before both snow and night started to fall.  And fall that snow did.  Inches and inches within an hour.  The main street outside our office was bumper to bumper, and of course the only way out was up a hill and then onto the interstate (I seem to find myself at the bottom of hills a lot when it snows, or maybe I just notice my low-altitude status more due to circumstance).  It took me three hours to make it up that hill and another two of crawling along the freeway, semis blowing by me like it was an eighty-degree summer day, before I pulled into the garage.  J greeted me at the door with a martini, and I collapsed in a heap in front of the fire.  I believe there were two more martinis consumed that evening, and I’m pretty sure the sleep was long and sound.  The next day, the roads were so bad that pretty much every office in the city was closed.  I think all of the adults who somehow made it home needed a snow day to recover from the snowy commute from hell.

This day’s sky is darkening.  The birds have been fed twice now, and only the cardinals are left prowling the feeders for one last seed to get them through another cold night.  Tomorrow, the forecast calls for warmer temperatures and partly cloudy skies.  The ice will melt and run off the roads as folks head to offices and stores—depending on how fast it melts, I may join them and venture out, slowly and carefully like the old human I am, to snag a new modem—and the snow that blankets the lawn will turn to a patchwork quilt of green and white before slipping entirely into memory beneath the cool gaze of the crescent moon.  Dear snow, you will be missed.  But absence, so they say, makes the heart grow fonder.  I should be ready to rekindle our Romance again by next December—or January after next, or February three years from now . . . .