A Snow Day

This morning, I pushed back the curtains and revealed a snowy day. Because the dawn had barely pierced the horizon, the 7am light against the snow shone dark blue, an indigo glow. The lamp I sat beside filled the room with the warmest orange any artificial bulb could make besides the sun itself. My day began surrounded by vivid colors. I could hear cars struggling to climb the hill, and I remarked to myself, “Another trial for our leaning fence.” The contrasts have changed for good this far into the calendar year, the temperatures have traded places between indoors and outside, our skin is burdened to adapt, and our morning routines take much longer. This is something only some of us experience, and why others become “snow-birds.” It might feel unnatural to me to sunbathe in December or to decorate a palm tree for Christmas. One year, Chris and I escaped to Las Vegas for the holidays, and as the sun shone on my bare skin and the dry desert air entered my lungs I longed for a little smokey cabin on a hillside. We did enjoy the change of tradition that year, but I also learned about my undeniable love for the woods.

Once I wrestled into boots and overalls I took my walk, carefully, too old for broken bones. I picked up a nice pace once I felt solid traction beneath my feet and was off, exploring neighborhood animal tracks. I spotted deer tracks first, easy to identify. Their footprints land in such a straight line, the city could hire them to walk through paint and mark curbs if only they would take direction. I saw little bird print shuffles, maybe a red breasted robin had hopped along the path before I arrived. My own feet get cold under wool socks and leather boots but humans don’t use countercurrent heat exchange, something I learned about today after wondering for long enough. Birds’ ability to keep their feet from freezing comes because their veins and arteries are close enough together to transfer heat back and forth, a physiological adaptation. Nature has an intelligence hiding right beneath our noses.

Another scientific occurrence about a snowy morning is the silence, my favorite. According to The Weather Channel, the intricate design of snowflakes catch sound waves, dampening sound before they reach the ear, it’s a wonderful function of an intact and freshly fallen snowflake. After a few hours of melting and compacting, its dampening effect becomes weak, but there is nothing quite like what I call the “snow peace.”

On snow days when I was a child, my mother used to take the phone off the hook to keep my dad from getting called out to work salting and scraping roads. We would pick up a giant order of Pizza Hut cheese sticks, and then make snow cream. Now days, I have coffee in my own house and wonder what the next (hopefully) 40 years will be like. I find company among the birds and the white- tailed deer. My wistful affection for the past stings like fingers left out in the cold, but soon melts away like the little Campbell’s soup boy, coming inside after playing in the snow. The mess left on linoleum from melted snow is too the mess left in my heart after after a moment reminiscing. But puddles can be mopped up with a tiny bit of effort, and then there’s that old saying about spilled milk.

I hope your snow days are filled with sticky hot chocolate with lots of marshmallows, and I hope your puddles stay small. None of us can escape the ever changing scenery of our snow days, but we can notice their beauty forever.

Thank you for reading, and as always drop me a line, I DO love to chat!

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