Snow Day

They closed schools, shut the subways down, the BQE became a ghost tunnel, and we prepared for the blustering, dumping, blizzard they said it would be.

Instead, the storm surged East and North and we had a slushy few inches. 

A let-down, in some ways. I expected a wonderland when I woke up. And, for me, I thought how much better a snow day would be if I didn't have to wake up and be ​present​. If I could read all day in my pajamas, watch a dumb movie on tv. 

At least, we thought, Little O could play in the snow, in a way he couldn't in his infancy last year. We bundled him in his space-suit, his hood an astronaut puff. We stepped out the door, caked snow on his mittens, touched it to his cheek, our voices knocking up a register, as always. ​Snow! Snow!  He sat in it, looked at it, had this way of looking back up at us, glum and unimpressed, wondering when we'd take him in from the cold. 

Our usually happy baby spent the rest of the day indoors crying, fussing, unhappily being plopped from one uninteresting activity to the next. The mat, his room, the bag of books, the basket of toys, the slinking dog pull-thing, the ride-on push-car with its piano keys. None of it inspiring, apparently. 

Yes, we stayed safe. Yes, all was not lost or destroyed. We are lucky. But I feel his restlessness. So much excitement over the white-stuff. Press conferences and news headlines. Empty supermarket shelves. The possibility that the world we know and everything around it could turn white and drift and slope, shake our footing, shape the ground, contour our lives, and we'd see something we'd never really seen before. 

I guess the gray and white days will slog along just the same until spring. 

Wonderland

When I woke up yesterday I was like a child, went straight to the window to see what magic the night storm had brought.  There were, maybe, ten inches of snow and New Englander Tyler scoffed, that's nothing, but the kids were outside whooping and dragging sleds and the shovels scratched across the sidewalks and I insisted we go to Prospect Park to see it pure.  

I expected to see the long wide meadows of Prospect Park in a sheet of white, but I had forgotten that this oasis is also made of narrow, wandering trails, so we found ourselves inside this wonderland.  

Here in the middle of concrete Brooklyn.  

Thoughts on The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

I'm grateful to the ever-lovely Amy Sonnischsen  for letting me know about Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child. This book kept me reading late into the night and had me obsessively reflecting early the next morning.

The story is about a childless couple, Jack and Mabel.  They build a child out of snow.  The next morning, their creation is gone.  But a child of the woods, who calls herself Faina, finds her way to them.

It's a simple tale, based on a fairytale in fact, but not so straight-forward because it is rendered with a veiled simplicity.  The story is as harsh and beautiful as the wild Alaskan landscape Ivey paints. She walks a thin, ice-crack line between magic and realism.  It wind-soars with the beauty of childhood itself, then reminds us how fleeting childhood truly is.  Questions haunt and linger, keep our hearts beating with wonder. What is real? What is imagined?  Does it matter, really, in the end?

This book, for me, was magic. Some books create a stirring within me, a whisper in my heart. I wish I had written this, I think.  It's not jealousy. It's a feeling hard to express. An ache that says, if only this book were mine, not just as I read it or hold it or think of it tomorrow or next year or forever. But if it were inherently mine.  I felt that way about this book.

I read The Snow Child before and after a snowy hike of my own.  When I reached the peak and turned around, there was, I kid you not, a little rose-cheeked girl with white-blonde hair sitting in the snow.  She leaned against a birch tree.  She held a sandwich in her tiny hands. She was chaperoned, of course.  Not the wild wood creature I wanted to imagine.  But I couldn't believe the strange and wonderful way this book had come true for me.

Snow Hike

I had an extraordinary weekend hiking up to the clouds in the Catskills. I had never hiked through snow before but it turned out to be one of the most beautiful, satisfying hikes I had ever been on.  When I reached the peak, all breathless and red-cheeked, the trees were bare, the sky was blue, and the snow was a perfect, untouched white.  I didn't feel cold at all. 

These ferns were so pleased with themselves.  Like two miniature trees in an open field. I don't know that I've ever seen snow so soft and pure. 

Starry Christmas

 

Purple starred fish the afternoon of Christmas Eve.

And falling snow to wish upon at night.

Wishing you all a very, merry Christmas!

But It's Snowing!

When I woke up this morning, I searched frantically for my glasses so I could run to the window and see this view of snow.

I have never considered snow bothersome.  

During childhood, it meant that I didn't have to go to school.  In college, it meant I could sled down Libe slope.  When I lived in Boston, I was within walking distance of my graduate classes.  And as I entered the working world in New York City, I never worried about whether or not I could get to work.  The subway runs, my friends.  It. Always. Runs.  

I recognize that for some people snow is a real inconvenience.  I have never seen it that way.

So, this morning, I leapt down the stairs to look out the front door and my little two year old neighbor, Margot, came out in her pajamas.  

It's snowing!  I told her, excitedly.

She came to the door with me, peeked her head out and said nothing.

Look at it!  Isn't it pretty? Let's go play in it! I said, silently praying that this dear child would give me an excuse to play in snow.

She turned her attention to her scooter in the foyer.  Do you like my scooter? she asked.

Yes.  I like your scooter.  But it's snowing!  

I'm going to eat my breakfast.  

Well then.