It’s snowing; snowing like it rains, in tiny little pricking droves. Falling quickly and fading even more so on the ground still warm from the sun that seldom visits. Most likely it’s only warm because of the footsteps; the friction of the masses that melts the uniqueness of the snowflake into grayness. But I digress. The day is silver, intensified mystically by the white falling from it. It falls down upon the brown of all that once lived, sprinkling its tedious dormancy with reassurance that they did not slow down their metabolisms and fold in their leaves without purpose. It’s falling harder now, precipitation makes almost mathematical wave forms that, if calculable, would make such beautiful music; music you can not hear for all the traffic and the permeating buzz of the electric string draped all over this city like a spider’s web. The snow is overcoming the ground now, beating the warmth out of it with the sheer numbers of its descent. It seems that light is falling, obliterating all shadows on its way. It seems to seek out the dark places, the places where it could not reach when it was a distant sphere. It illumines those places with a sort of heavenly everywhere-light that nothing can match.
Somewhere, I am much younger, hoping and praying for more, perhaps they’ll cancel school, perhaps I could build a snowman, perhaps I’ll be able to sled this year without getting my snowpants full of mud. It reminds me of home and the ice-like assurance of snow. Every year the snow would come, landing on the eager tongues of giddy children; the snowflakes landing in our mouths and only by our excitement could we feel it as it melted so instantly, becoming a part of us. The trick was to try to move around so as to catch the scarce larger ones in our mouths, the moving, of course, defeated the object but we tried nonetheless. It would snow all through the night, creating that special glow that comes with the snow, when the ground is so much closer to the sky. It was at that time that I would walk, in the silence of my loudly crunching boots I heard nothing. On other nights I would walk under the cold clear sky, the moon creating an impossible daylight, the stars and I counting the minutes. I could see farther into the sky on those nights, see beyond the cloudless atmosphere and the void. I could touch something with my mittened hand or freezing fingertips, something I have missed. To sleep in the warmth of the house, the snow welcome, but kept out. This was the most silent of times, waking up in awe and wonder at the light that was beyond white, a purity that comes when a little boy's snowman is tall enough to touch the sky.