After a deep snowfall, the streets, the cars, the neighborhoods, the trees—really everything—is completely buried. Schools are closed. Time itself is forced into a pause, and by the simple fact of the fall, we are forced into stasis. Snow plows groan awake, narrowing our world to our homes, our legs, and our sleds. Or, there is the other kind of snow: the gradual accumulation. The amalgamation of winter still untouched, maybe unnoticed—the kind of snow that arrives without spectacle—that is the rhythm of the background of our days, until it is all you see, everywhere, completely unavoidable. It asks belatedly to be acknowledged: yesterday's snow, the kind we don’t bother to hold as we continue to go about our life routines. We walk right by it, protecting our shoes, the bells of our jeans, too distracted by the cold to care for the majesty of winter itself. Both of these falls, although different in approach, embed us, unmistakably, in winter.
It's silly how much the first snow commands us. We abandon everything to celebrate it. Kissing, hugging, playing, pressing our bodies together for warmth, holding our palms and tongues out to try and catch flakes in the frosted air. We want proof that we were there when it began. Believing, maybe naively, that sheer presence itself can preserve the feeling, that by being there fully we might keep it forever.
When I was little, I learned that in these conditions, magic could occur. I should say that I often played outside alone—not because no one would play with me or because I was a recluse, but because I preferred it. I liked talking to myself out loud, waddling at my own pace, steering the pirate ship at my leisure without the watchful eye of another waiting their turn and cramping my daydreams of driving a car around the suburbs. And when it snowed, well, that was my favorite because the world felt hushed. A muted blanket laid gently over everything we thought we knew. The familiar outline of my backyard, the muddy spots I knew to avoid, the patches where grass refused to grow were all disguised. Vanished. Everything is new when it snows. I knew nothing.
And in that nothing, I discovered something. Held inside the weight of my weatherproof suit, if I let my body meet the snow in an untouched place on this white down and closed my eyes, the world would loosen its grip. The ground no longer felt like the ground but like soft erasure. The snow opened itself to me, receiving my weight, shaping itself simply around my being there. As my body lost its borders, I was no longer pressing into the earth but being held inside it.
My breath would grow quiet, feeling like it belonged to the snow as much as to me. My shape sank away, not disappearing but becoming less necessary, as if I no longer needed to be solid. And this is when I would feel an almost imperceptible lift. Not a movement exactly, but permission. A gentle rising, the way thoughts float before words string together and become a sentence. I always believed that this must be what ascending feels like. Not arrival or escape, just the soft forgetting of gravity.
I didn't know where I was going. I'm not particularly religious, but if I were, I’d say it would be to that place they talk about, where all the good people go. Behind my eyelids, the dark would glow, not with light, but with the memory of seeing, the flecks, the shimmers. The world circled there faintly, dissolving as if even sight was learning how to let go.
The cold moved through me, cramming itself into the crevices where fabric failed skin. Inside my gloves and in the small of my back, the sting would linger, but this always added to the ceremony. The aliveness of the whole affair, I supposed. The feeling of truly being engulfed by nature, but still knowing you are safe.
When snow is falling, it's even better. Looking up, the sky releasing endless pale flecks, each one drifting towards arbitrary new homes. My cheeks swelled with warmth, a blooming heat protecting me from the quiet cold pressing in. The air feels thicker then, padded, as if the world is wrapped in cotton.
I've always thought of it as angel tears falling infinitely and soundlessly, not needing to be noticed, because there are enough of them already laid bare on the earth's floor. The sky sheds something it can no longer hold, and lying beneath it, I felt briefly forgiven, allowed to be small and still without explanation.
Then something would always call me back—a branch cracking, a gust of wind lifting its voice. I would open my eyes and the sky would still be there, vast and indifferent. A bird might pass through it, and I would understand that the world had continued while I was gone, and that I had been allowed, briefly, to step outside of time. And in that return, everything was enough.
