First Snow and the Magic of Winter

The title for this post actually sounds like it might make a neat Christmas story. First Snow and her siblings Second and Third go in search of the lost Magic of Winter, without which there can be no Christmas…

But I digress.

The reason I sat down to write this post is actually that two nights ago came the first snowfall of the season. (We – and by we I mean me and my people – all went “Snow in October, are you kidding with this?!”, but it’s gone already.)

I’m a lover of all things white, especially when it comes falling gently from the sky in that sleepy way that makes you think of when you were a kid tugging a sled behind you on your way home from school, having had fun all day on that tiniest hill imaginable by the school playground, which then had felt like the Hill Everest, and every time you got to slide down it was a treat after having struggled with the sled in tow up it. Those were the days.

Here’s what I love about snow:

• the visual stimulus of how it makes everything clean and soft
• how it glitters invitingly in the sunlight
• how it feels to spread your hand and place it palm down on top of it, feeling it melting from your body heat
• the sensation of walking through it when it’s up to your knees
• tilting my head back and letting the snowflakes hit my face
• snowflakes, big and thick, hushing the earth into silence, because it really does – it makes everything just hush
• building snowmen and snow lanterns
• how the winter night isn’t so dark when there’s snow around to reflect the moon
• sliding down giant slopes on any form of equipment
• that sense of childish glee I feel whenever I make a snow angel
• coming in from a long walk in the cold and having something hot to drink or possibly eat (hot cocoa with tiny marshmallows, tea, soup)
• But most of all I love the crunchy sound it makes underneath your shoes when it’s really cold out. That’s the truest sound of Christmas. Ever.

Last winter we had the most beautiful winter in a really long time, with nearly two meters of snow and an even, cold climate that kept it as it was for over three months. It was absolutely wonderful, but then, I was within walking distance of my then-job and I didn’t have to worry about digging my car out of a pile of snow or my train being constantly delayed or cancelled, so I could understand the people that were getting a bit whiny after two months of snow fall upon snow fall.

 

Of course, not every winter is like that.

Here’s a few things that depress me about snow:

• When it turns into slush the next day
• When the slush freezes into ice the next day after that and you nearly break your neck just stepping out your door
• When it comes down in tiny little hard icicles that prick your skin and makes your nose feel like it’s about to fall off
• When you have to dig your car out of a pile of it – particularly when you’re borrowing a car since you don’t have one of your own so you’re not so dumb that you don’t know there will be digging out that needs to be done, but you’re also not so savvy that you’ve taken this into your morning calculations of How To Get To Work On-Time and you come outside and go… OH, DAMN!
• When your train is delayed or possibly cancelled and you have to wait for a bus for forty-five minutes
• How old people scared of broken bones barely dare venture outside for fear of the frozen-slush-ice
• But most of all I dislike how dark it is here for snow-season. For the darkest period the sun isn’t in the sky before eight am and it starts going down at roughly two, with darkness setting in around three in the pm, which is sort of nutso in my book. We get the light back in the summer, though, so… maybe I shouldn’t complain about it.

I also dislike blizzards if I’m in the middle of one outside, but I love them when I’m inside and can watch it through my window while drinking hot cocoa, pitying the fools who might be outside, stuck in the middle of a freaking blizzard.

If I’m to go by bullet list, though, the pro’s of a winter clad in white definitively outweighs the con’s, which is a good thing, because I’m not sure I could live in the tropics and a move might have been worth considering if the outcome had been different. All that heat… man, a whole other bullet list.

 

~ by mescribe on October 23, 2010.