The New is Old Again

I miss snow. Real snow. Snow that starts in November at the latest and hangs on into April. Snow that packs down on sidewalks and in streets, so that even after shoveling and plowing the sound of your boots on pavement is a bit of a shock. Snow that glitters in the sun and under streetlights at night, snow that gathers in your hair and dampens sound. Because even though shoveling gets to be a pain, and scraping car windows just makes me more late for everything, and even though bare sidewalks in January mean I can keep running outside without worrying about killing myself on a patch of ice, I love winter and I love snow.

It probably couldn’t be any other way. I grew up across the street from a winter fairyland. I can remember two winters specifically, although there may have been more, that I practically lived there after school. There must have been a lot of snow when I was in fourth and fifth grade, because the church parking lot across the street from my house had enormous plow piles all around the edges of it. Tall, magnificent piles you could climb all over, pretending you were traversing endless rugged mountains. There were places, though—miniature chasms and shallow depressions—where you could sit, hidden from the whole world, nestled in snow and quiet. I gathered icicles, smoothed out snow thrones, pretended I was a queen, a fairy, a wanderer. I lost track of everything else in the silence and the glittering snow and the blue shadows.

Did you have places like that?

Do you now?

*       *       *

I think about where we live now, and wonder if my kids will ever get to play in the snow the way I got to. If—because they were too young and I was too exhausted when we lived in snowy places, or because now we live in a place that has snow only in stingy amounts—they will never while away the hours in that kind of wonderland.

The temperatures this week have gotten into the 50s for days in a row. It feels nothing like winter. The kids have been outside a lot, playing in the dirt. The city dug up a large part of our yard before Christmas because of a storm sewer project, so we not only don’t have snow, we have a wide swath of turned-up earth. Clay, really. And my children have discovered that you can make things out of it. Turns out it’s like having a yard full of free brown Play-doh. They spend hours sitting in our torn-up yard, dreaming and creating. Their hands are stained, and they bring me gifts.

Watching them outside, completely absorbed, I realized the other day that there was a magic to it all that was familiar. A different form of it, and all their own, but I recognized it nonetheless.

For that I am thankful.

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