What is snow?
Snow is rain that has frozen, sure.
Snow is a reminder that I am not in the place where I grew up, a reminder that I chose to move 3,000 miles away. Snow made a few guest appearances in my childhood, but wasn’t a season regular. I wonder what it’s like to grow up with snow as a regular. What effect does snow have on a child’s brain, heart and soul?
Snow is a white blanket, a select-all for the landscape. Untouched snow Apple A’s the road, the roofs, the tree tops, anything that faces up, and makes me think of a world without anything that steps or falls. A stunning, quiet, bereft world. When I look closely, I see powder wisping upwards, evidence of how the wind moves.
When I step onto the snow, it becomes proof that I am here, that things that step and fall are here. There are animal prints in the snow outside our apartment next to the trash and recycling bins. An animal investigated our trash! I follow the prints to see if any animal is still there — nope.
Snow is proof that environment affects form and maybe even essence. Under certain conditions, water that falls from the sky is rain. Under other conditions, water that falls from the sky is snow. Under other conditions, water that falls from the sky is fog, steam, mist.
Fog is not snow, but fog is something I grew up with. Nothing says San Francisco more than fog. Unlike snow, fog does not sit on the ground; it hangs, looms. Fog is like air jello you can walk through. You shouldn’t turn your brights on if you’re driving through heavy fog because all that light will reflect right back at you, blinding. With enough fog, something could be right in front of you, and you’d never know.
I can’t hold fog in my hands but I can hold snow. I don’t think I’ve ever made a snowman. I have, however, made a big heart out of snow. I was with Jess in Prospect Park in February 2021, so you know what that means — we were trying to be happy. Jess grew up with snow and did the majority of the manual labor required to make the heart; my fingers got too cold and I retreated. Jess arranged twigs beneath the heart so that they read GROW ME. We were hopeful that people would see the heart, read the twigs, and add something.
As temperatures rise, the color of snow changes from white to translucent to gone. Snow transforms back into water. In Prospect Park, the field dampens, the lake gains volume, the pavement darkens. Outside of my apartment, animal prints and my boot prints fade and flatten into liquid, which seeps into the cement or pools in a corner or drains into a storm drain.
If it stays below 32 degrees, but doesn’t rain, the snow can become ice. Snow on the sidewalk mixes with dirt and soil from peoples’ boots, becoming brown and muddled. The shape of snow becomes more geometric, pointier. Sometimes snow becomes icicles, dripping into sharp ends.
In college, this girl was walking by an old, tall building, and a sheet of ice slipped off of the roof and hit her on the head. She had to get stitches. I hate thinking about this. I hate thinking about sheets of ice randomly falling and slicing my skin, exposing my skull. Unfortunately I do think about this whenever I see an icicle, and for this reason I am always oddly aware of tall buildings that may have ice sheets on them, and I try to walk at whatever distance from them I deem least likely to be the site of something icy falling. I think she lives in San Diego now.
Snow is something we wait for. Will it snow today? becomes a topic of conversation. When it snows, I take a picture of the street I live on and I send it to my family GroupMe, exclaiming, it snowed today! My dad types, brrr! My brother texts me about how this is the coldest it’s been since he moved to New York, that it reminds him of Connecticut. I text him back: it’s cancel-your-plans cold.
Snow is an impediment to moving around. I have to move the car across the street because of street sweeping. When I put the car in reverse I can’t see anything out of the back-camera because it’s frozen over. The car lurches and crunches over a pile of snow on the ground. I double-park across the street so that the street sweeper can make it down the road and clean up the leaves and the muddling snow. I look out the window from our bedroom and see that I’m the only one who moved a car across the street. The street sweeper never comes. I feel distinctly Californian.
Snow is a sign that it’s cold out, but that it could be colder. Sometimes it is too cold for snow. I didn’t know this until I lived on the East Coast. I thought snow was what happened at the coldest of colds. But snow actually means you’re in one zone of cold, and there are zones below that. Below the snow zones are the bone-chilling, space-heating, painful zones. In these zones, when I go outside, my eyes water, and that water rapidly turns into crusty dust in my crows’ feet.
If you wanted to preserve snow, you’d have to bottle it up and then keep it somewhere in the right temperature. You could put it in a jar and then create a zone that is the right temperature. I think a freezer would be too cold and a cooler too warm, you’d have to make just the right space.
The antidote to snow is salt. When it snows, people salt the streets. I don’t fully understand this. I think the salt prevents ice from being too slippery. So really the salt is placed not because of the snow, but because of what snow might become, if it gets colder. When I walk to the subway, I pass a tree frequently surrounded by finches, but finch-less today. If they were here, pecking at the ground, I wonder if they’d like or dislike the taste of salt.
Part of the lake in Prospect Park is frozen over. The ice curves on the surface, smooth like someone drew it. All the birds I can see perch on the edge of the ice like sentinels. Most of them stand on one foot. The small black birds, which I believe are American Coots, stand on two feet. They’re my favorite of the birds I see on the lake, taking first place ahead of the mallards, the geese and the occasional swan.
Another morning all the birds I can see swim in a part of the lake that is not frozen, near the lake’s edge where I stand. They either move like they have somewhere they need to go, or they sleep, heads tucked into feathers, bodies floating. One goose dunks its head under water over and over in frantic baptism and I’m like are you okay. One mallard flubs out of the water onto the ice and waddles towards another unfrozen section before turning around and waddling back towards where he came from.
Snow is a stop on the way to water or ice, which are themselves stops on the way to other things. Snow is a reminder that time is made up of things changing form, things beginning and ending.
Snow is falling; if not near you, somewhere, and if not now, sometime.
Last week, I invited readers to share what they believe their purpose is. One reader replied: I choose to believe my purpose is experiencing the universe.
as an east coast child, snow meant freedom! not having to go to school, getting to play outside in the middle of the day, assignments or tests getting delayed, etc. i never thought about how people from the west coast have a completely different relationship to snow as an adult than east coasters - i miss when it meant relief from responsibilities and/or guaranteed coziness.