Changing with the Snow
One thing that never changes about a snowstorm: its beauty. Yesterday, for the second time in my life, I watched a heavy snowfall from a 20th floor window, and it looked no less magical than it did out in suburbia. Peering in the direction of the Empire State Building, usually clearly visible, I saw only gray. Some buildings just disappeared into it. And in the nighttime, you could not tell if the snow was still falling unless you looked at the small patch of air illuminated by the streetlights. But my favorite thing about the snow might be how it can be so quiet and omnipresent at the same time.
My earliest memory of playing in the snow is from Forest Hills. My dad had taken me for a walk around the block in my snowsuit, and I was able to climb so high on a snow pile that I was taller than a car. I think my snowsuit was a onesie. Classic. When you are little, snow is amazing for so many reasons, but the first is most obvious…
My sisters and I would sleep with wooden spoons under our pillows. When I was younger, one of my parents would sneak into my room and turn off my alarm for me. I always heard them and smiled in my sleep, knowing what was to come (and that it wasn’t school). Later on, we knew our fate when the automated message came in at five in the morning and woke up the whole house. Such a good feeling knowing you can fall back asleep.
As you get older, you start turning off your alarm yourself. A snow day is just as exciting for lack of school, but not so you can make snow angels and have snowball fights instead. It’s exciting because you can sleep until noon then watch TV all day. The snow is still as present, but we get better at ignoring what that can really mean.
In college, snow days are only a thing if your professor lives too far away to safely commute. I remember waking up to my friends all texting about cancelled classes, only to learn I still had to walk, snowboot-clad, down hundreds of icy steps to attend my sculpture class. Not bitter at all.
Yesterday, I fell asleep to snow, woke up to snow, and yet resumed doing the same thing I have been doing for the last eleven months: working from home. I watched from above as retailers shoveled their little patches of concrete, but I could not know what it felt like to be out there. I had meetings to make, emails to send, life to live “as normal.”
I thought of my dad back home shoveling the driveway and wished I could help him out. And my mom who was able to take off today and yesterday following those five am calls. And I watched as the NYC snow slowed, and turned into a light flurry, and then started graying in piles at the street corners, becoming quicksand pits of slush.
Snow will always be beautiful, whether it sticks to each and every twig of the oaks in my front yard in Westchester or lies down on a backhoe digging out a sewage pipe on 32nd street, rendering it dormant. No matter how old I am, there will always be that feeling in the air, that smell, that tells you what’s coming, like the saturation of the whole world has been lowered just a bit.
And I am not too old to revisit what it used to mean. My mom and I built a fantastic snowman, christened Snowy by my dad, the last time we got some decent inches. There’s nothing like falling down into a snow pile and only feeling a whisper of the cold, knowing your layers upon layers are doing the job.
Last night, my roommate and I went out briefly for some pizza, and while stomping across 3rd avenue in our boots, we saw very few people and fewer cars. The city had seemed to stop, yet I knew that in Central park and in many places across the city, kids were coming out to enjoy a day without school and a snowfall rare to NYC. I knew somewhere, a kid was marveling at how standing on a snow pile could raise her above the cars parked along the street. So snow never really changes, but we do.