I spent the first 18 years of my life living in South Florida where I spoke the language of sand, intuited the rhythms of the ocean, and trafficked in seashells. All this worked just fine for the wallpaper of my young life until this time of year rolled around.
I wanted snow.
Christmas television shows featured well-groomed people in coats delighted by falling snowflakes. Holiday cards showcased sleighs and earnest carolers in mittens or fireplaces blazing at warp factor 10. There was Frosty and the Abominable Snowman (who was scary on the outside but a marshmallow on the inside, according to Rudolph and his posse in the annual TV special.)
In South Florida, everything remained Technicolored and perfumed and air conditioned. In December we still wore our sandals and our shorts and our suntans. After we opened our gifts on Christmas Day, we put on our suits and went to the beach where, if you bought the local version of things, Santa had skied into town the night before wearing sunscreen and swim trunks and some really goofy looking sunglasses.
I wanted snow.
While I watched news clips of much of the nation stranded in airports because of blizzards or shoveling snow from buried driveways, my dad bought cans of white spray goo and painted fake drifts into the corners of our living room windows, which made me feel worse. On TV I saw how snow transformed, unlocked joy, stopped cars and planes and all of life’s busy noises. I glorified it, yearned for it and bemoaned the absence of it in my life.
The year after high school I joined Up With People, a wholesome performing group that toured the smaller towns of the U.S. singing about hope and peace. I was 18. We had been on the road performing for five months, and it was this time of year when our cast of 75 pulled into Fayetteville, Ark. A swarm of host families gathered in a parking lot with signs bearing our names.
The early winter weather had been chilly, and I proudly sported my first coat. During dinner small talk the dad of the house said the prediction was possible snow in the next few days. I told my host family I’d never seen it. They all looked at me with a mixture of pity and incomprehension, the way I imagine I look at people who say they have never seen the ocean.
After dinner I took a shower. In my bedroom I found a heating lamp arced over the bed. I opened my towel, turned on the lamp, lay on the bed and drifted into a half sleep. My host mom knocked on the door about 20 minutes later, which woke me. I sat up and felt what I had done. The heating lamp had a second setting: sunlamp. I had fallen asleep under the sunlamp and broiled myself crimson from the waist up. Within a few hours I was swollen and covered in blisters with skin so tender it was agony for anything to touch it.
The next morning I was in bed when my host mom knocked on the door. “I have a surprise for you,” she said. She beamed as she pulled the curtains open. Snow. My First Snow. The Snow I Had Been Waiting For and Wanting For Years. The backyard was blanketed in white. I was mesmerized and giddy.
Without a second thought and with a remarkable absence of pain, I pulled on my scarf, sweater and boots and ran outside into the snow. I sprinted into the promise of it, into the big, unbroken white carpet of it. The world was still and hushed and perfect and magic. I’d never known anything like it.
I made snowballs and snow angels. I ate handfuls of it. I shook the snow off the trees. And then I uncurled the scarf from my neck, lifted my sweater, unzipped my jeans and fell into the frigid powder face first. My sunburned skin went numb, as blessedly blank as the backyard. I felt nothing; I felt everything.
I wanted snow. When I encountered it that first time decades ago, it felt as if it healed me. And now I want it again. When it comes, I will bundle up, go outside and let it work its magic once again.
