Snow Day

Today, fall finally fell upon Morgantown. The slight sting in the air got me thinking about the season ahead and the hope of snow. 

I remember snow as a New Yorker. It was 24 years ago, when I spent five months on the Upper East Side. 

The city is hard, even on Mother Nature. Snowflakes first starched and pressed like fine linen fall flaccid and stained when met by pavement or skyscraper.  New Yorkers, in their hard black shells, scuttle along sidewalks and underneath scaffolding, gathering in entryways to noisy tunnels underground. I marveled at hundreds of them each morning on my way to the 6 train, all heavy in wool Burberry, tightly wound in cashmere scarves, moving fast yet mindful to sidestep a snow-covered sidewalk grate. In the city, winter is a fury, a season to bear.

At home in West Virginia, Mother Nature is safe, benevolent. The fluffy train of her winter-white gown lays undisturbed on vast expanses of grass and trees. These are quiet places, perhaps dotted with deer hooves or uneven in patches where the top layer of snow is folded back by the wind. Townspeople, cheeks rubbed pink by a flirtatious breeze, stay for long hellos on lamp-lit street corners.  As evening’s indigo blanket settles over a cirrus-streaked sky, I am at my bedroom’s only window. If I listen close, I can hear the hooves of deer crunching leaves in the backyard. This is splendor, I’m reminded…or scolded, for when I’m not careful or grateful, I’ll dismiss it like a million breaths or blinks.

As memory will, mine warms the past with myth. That brusque city winter is now a collection of storefronts in miniature, arcing an oblong rink where a single, tiny ice skater spins and swirls to “White Christmas,” all blissful and balmy in a small glass orb cupped in my hearth-warmed hand. It takes but a glimpse of a snowy New York night on the TV screen to send my thoughts swirling up and away in a wind-swell of what ifs.  I imagine myself seated by the window of a warm West Village café, looking outside to a street stolen from a Victorian painting: lush with greenery, heavily saturated in burgundy, emerald, royal blue. Home, never a long walk from anywhere, is a just-right studio near Washington Square Park, where I watch joyful mixed breeds and Standard Poodles bounding through powdery groundcover while their owners sip coffee in paper cups from the deli across the street.

A new snow is like childhood: pure, wondrous, shaped by all that it will touch. When I was small, winter brought gifts of days off from school and snow angels in front of the neighbor’s rhododendron bush, aka the preferred bathroom of our beagle, Cujo. My big brother, Kevin, and I made lop-sided Frosty-men on the wooden deck atop the front porch, which Dad had built, meticulously and obsessively, as is his style for home improvement and life in general. We went sled-riding on the hill between my friend Cara’s textbook-tidy middle class-home and the sagging duplex of the man who dressed as Santa in the Christmas parade. 

Mom would lay out gloves; “toboggans” (or beanies if you aren’t from North Central West Virginia); and puffy overalls bought once every few years from Fanjul’s Outlet near my Grandma’s on the east end of town. Sometimes Kev would cover his Calabrian-Italian good looks with a full-face ski mask that showed off his best feature, in my opinion: his smile. His front teeth recline slightly, a visual foil to the anything-but-relaxed nature of our Costello genes. His “got away with something” laugh is only ever the result of three things: his own quick-witted retort, a recollection of a quirky movie scene, or a reaction to my young sons’ exploration of bathroom humor. 

My favorite times sled-riding were the days when the older kids would build a jump in the middle of the hill. They’d carry buckets of water from Cara’s house to pour over a hand-packed hump of snow. If it was cold enough, the water would freeze in a flash, and we wouldn’t have to wait to try it out. Kevin was the Evil Knievel of sledding on his wooden Flexible Flyer, making a running start for the jump, going faster and higher than anyone else. Once he went to fast and so high that his sled landed upright, stuck like a dart in the side of the hill. 

The first time my dog saw snow, I thought he’d be afraid. Or at least curious. He was still tiny then, a brown, wriggly bunched-up thing always in my arms.  Because he outright refused to climb the metal steps leading to my college apartment, I would carry him to the bottom and follow him, floppy-tailed and frolicking, to a patch of grass beside the ground-level window of the neighbor with a dog named Dude. This was the routine, many times a day. 

On one frigid December morning, the grass was covered in a white crust that sparkled under the glance of the sun. Kaiser went on as if nothing were different, his pink nose shoveling a path to his chosen place of squatting. I remember thinking that soon he’d be old enough not to squat anymore, disciplined enough to pass the bed without tugging at the sheet’s hanging corner, big enough to have lost those razor-sharp teeth. For 12 years, Kaiser and I grew together: moved and settled many times; made fewer messes for others to clean. When I think back to that wobbly puppy on a snowy December morning, I see my first lesson in unconditional love.  

Now I am now old enough to be the dutiful mother, laying out boots and hats and gloves so my little darlings will stay warm and dry as they glide and roll down the steep incline of our backyard, which remains devoid of child’s play for most of the year, aside from snow days and the occasional game of pass.  

Last winter’s lackluster performance fell far short of my children’s snow-day dreams. Luckily, their mother knows how to hold on to hope, stirring memories to life like flakes in a snow globe. When I think of the winter to come, I am nine years old again. A grin stretches my wind-chapped lips wide as I watch a masked daredevil with a familiar smile take flight.

May this winter grant precious days when our own small world is white and new.