Snow Storm

Twilight is creeping on. The snow takes on a blue tint that I have always thought looked holy. It's the blue of the robes of the saints rendered in glass when the light hits the church windows just right. It's the sacred violet of my most gorgeous and eerie dreams that settle deep in memory decades after they were first conjured.

I stand before a wall of windows in my house on a hill in the city. The steepest part of the street, abandoned by sensible drivers and cautious pedestrians, is crowded now with scores of excited kids. They pull sleds and and snowboards and brightly colored plastic saucers that were all but forgotten in the rafters of garages or the musty damp corners of basements until earlier in the day when snow gear was scrounged up and dusted off and set teetering at the top the hill, a hill that looks higher now and much more daring.

They swoosh down. Run up. Then down again. They have been at it since the first "all schools closed" announcement. And they are at it still as the sky fades to a haunting blue velvet and the streetlights glow steadily brighter illuminating snow, feathery light, as it drifts slowly down to settle on the bare limbs of trees and the slant of street and clusters of people

Joyful is one of those words that sounds antiquated and affected, like “merry” or “glorious,” yet remains the best descriptive of the noise that comes from the mouths of those snow-covered creatures of the hill. No words can be deciphered, only squeals and screams from the girls, and voice cracking, attention grabbing shouts of bravado from the teenage boys who speed down the hill far too fast for mothers to look, too fast for teenage girls not to.

The bloom of youth is as infatuated with life and love as it has always been. They eat the air. They stomp the earth flat. They crush time into brilliant diamonds that catch the light but cannot last. They remain new, confused and confusing. Boys try to shove snow down the collars of girls jackets. Girls try to run away. But not too hard. They get cold and wet and complain but stay.

They tolerate the younger kids, but barely. Those littler ones, fearless and slightly stupid to the ways of the world and gravity, jump on plastic disks set spinning wildly downhill. They tumble off, roughly, and muffle thud into snow banks. They barely miss the bumpers of parked cars and laugh it of as though they have forgotten, or maybe not yet fully realized, that they are not cartoon characters who can take anvils to the head with only dancing stars to contend with, but flesh and blood that hurts and bleeds. There may be stitches in their futures, some broken bones. And, for some, fates far worse. But on this night of snow and laughter they escape the random cruelty of chance, their futures remain swaddled in a quilted distance, memories yet to be made.

Dogs bark. They yip and nip. They run the hill up and down following the kids they know, chasing those they don't. The boots, the cold, this white stuff falling strange from the sky covers all the good smells but still tails wag.

The calico cats stay indoors cozy by the fire or, more often, curled up beside the furnace vents that blow heat and dust.

Mittens are lost.

Someone finds a red one, wooly and nubby knit with a hole in one thumb, and slips it over a ski pole stuck in a pile of snow. It looks as if it is waving. It looks as if it is giving the world a thumbs-up. More snow in the forecast!

Note: This is a rewrite and expanded version of something I wrote for a blog I had many years ago as a newspaper writer. Blogs were still relatively new then and few subscribers to the print paper ever bothered to read them even though several reporters, myself included, but not all were required to post daily in addition to writing our regular print stories. The randomness of the system frustrated me. One intensely snowy day the entire city shut down. A photographer and I were assigned to drive out to a specific public park in the city to get a sweet light story about people playing in the snow. Easy peasy. I'm no snow sissy. I grew up in Minnesota. But the city of Portland, Oregon doesn't have proper snow equipment. Streets weren't plowed. These were blizzard conditions. We trudged knee-deep across the park to find a total of three miserably cold kids who were eager to get home. Instead of going back to the newsroom, the photographer and I instead went back to my house to work. We sat at my dining room table writing and editing images while drinking hot chocolate. In those pre-Covid days, that kind of freedom felt magical. The irony was that the hill outside my living room window was jam packed full of kids sledding and snowboarding. They were still there after I filed the story so I blogged about the scene on the hill.