Winter, Midwestern style, some time ago.
It is hard to conjure up memories of childhood snows without a sneaking suspicion that they have been colored by the relentless mass-media momentum of the original Frosty the Snowman animated TV special, with its insistence on the sanctified magic of the winter’s first snowfall. But I know there are old family photos with that same vibe, images of cute blond sprites, including me, bundled up in our winter coats and snowpants, pommeled hats and clumsy mittens, out for a walk with our parents like dutiful penguin chicks, or else gathered around a leaning snowman in a suburban yard. And if I mentally squint I can conjure up a recollection of the impatience that gathered inside a classroom as we watched a dull midwestern overcast thicken on some too-short November day, hoping that the force of our collected wills would be enough to engender a snowstorm at last.
OK, boomer, you say, so what? Those unpixellated images of Baby Boom or Gen X childhoods, with their faded colors, do indeed seem like glimpses into a different time when so many inconvenient questions had not yet been asked, or at least had not yet seeped in a big way into mainstream consciousness. Like: is snow doomed? As the planet warms, is it going to go the way of other dated artifacts like an unbridled belief in technology making our lives easier, or a sure conviction that America would forever and ever stand as the world’s moral beacon?
I write these words having traveled for the holidays back to those midwestern skies, dim and depthless during the Christmas period. This time around the air was mild and moist, redolent of dank leaves wherever they had not been thoroughly gathered and bagged during suburbia’s annual fall cleanup. Small groups of deer came around my sister’s house every day, munching on evergreen shrubberies and driving the dogs into a frenzy.
Weren’t winters colder back when we were in school? she asked one day, when we were out walking to dissipate the dogs’ energies, and ours. She’s younger than I am, and our memory banks overlap incompletely.
Yes, I said, the late ‘70s, early ‘80s, those were cold winters, with lots of snow. One of them, I found a pathetic pair of little-kid skis in the basement and started cruising the snowbanks just to see how it would go. Snow was there a long time in those winters, gradually turning into crusted, sooty mounds that resembled pint-sized glaciers from which all memory of fluffiness or pristineness had been banished. They had little to do with those magical first snows, or with the sense of radical transformation that can take hold when the winter’s first snowstorm is on the way.
I feel that sense still, even if my desire for snowmen and snowball fights has waned. We came home to a Flagstaff that was still awaiting its first meaningful snowfall, although a few fall storms had left light dustings. I didn’t mind that it hadn’t happened yet. It’s easier to feed our woodstove from the stack in the backyard when the ground is dry, when I don’t have to worry about covering the crate of ready-to-use wood by the backdoor with a tarp.
But still. I am of the belief that if it is going to be cold then the temperature had better be accompanied by snowfall, so I was pleased when the forecast predicted the first of a series of storms last week. I hustled to make preparations in the afternoon as the sky grew ever darker: splitting some more last-minute kindling, splitting a few more logs in hopes of filling the covered woodshed as full as possible. Gray sky, brown ground: the color had leached from both land and atmosphere. I gathered up shredded juniper bark from the ground to use as fire starter. Made sure the chickens were fully provisioned with food and water. Hoped the Weather Service was on target.
And then it came, the sky bursting open just as it does in my nostalgic recollections of childhood, a few early flakes multiplying until they constituted a flurry, a whirl, a tizzy. A swarm of snowflakes, and then a horde, brushing the earth and tree branches white even as the streets remained black with the gathered warmth of the day. I’d neglected to wear a hat (sorry, mom!) and soon my glasses were streaked with meltwater, my hair matted with white globs. I didn’t mind.
It turned dark not long after the snow started, the dusk coming on even quicker than we’d gotten used to on the clear days. The snow continued through the evening hours, piling up fast on the patio, its reflected light banishing the darkness. The night was bright enough, the snow just deep enough that later, as the last flurries came, we heard snowboarders exuberantly trying their luck on the sloping street outside.
The night was otherwise hushed and for once I didn’t have any of the disquieting dreams that come so often, visions of what a darkly climate-changed world might look like, or whether AI will be directing people around before too long, or how tens of millions of my fellow citizens want to re-anoint for leadership the very man whose followers rioted so riotously inside the nation’s capital four years ago simply because he could not admit losing. So often the future looks dim. But in the morning the bright Arizona sun reflected off the pristine snow. A couple of my neighbors were out shoveling snow, one of my favorite neighborhood-participation exercises.
I joined them. The work felt good, and for a short spell at least I could feel all the old-time first-snow magic I needed.
