Tag: snow

Snow-wound

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Snow. Finally.

If that sounds like relief, bliss, accommodation, you’re mistaken. I like snow, but I also dread it in myriad ways. I think you know what I mean. Snow is pretty, all those crystalline scenes and twinkling tableaus. It facilitates novel outdoor activities — skiing, sledding, snowball fights, snow angels, murderous avalanches. 

But it’s also drudgery: shoveling and scraping, slush and brown blech. I once, as a full-grown adult, slipped on my ass into a giant snow bluff. I was carrying groceries. And I’m still so goddam mad about it, I could punch a snowman.  

It’s the last day of February and the planet chooses now to fart out four piddling inches of icy powder in our East Coast parts. It arrives all coy and cutesy after a stubbornly snow-free winter that I will blame on dystopian climate change. Better theories? Fire away. 

You gotta walk in this crap. And drive in it. Both are treacherous outings. Somehow I lost my crummy winter boots — Frankenstein would’ve loved them — so taking the limping dog out for a walk in my sneakers felt like a high-wire act. I kept thinking: If I fall on my ass again, I’m cashing it all in. I’m just going to lie there and melt away with the snow.

But Cubby was digging it. He made so much yellow snow, it looked like neon graffiti sprayed across the endless white canvass. I think he wrote his name. (Another snowy pastime. Those were the days!) 

The snow fell overnight. You go to sleep with black streets, gray sidewalks, bare trees, visible cars. And you wake up stuffed inside a marshmallow. Branches bowed with white, cars buried, streets streaked by road-ripping plows. It’s a winter wonderland. For about half a day.

Then, unless more layers fall, it’s ice and mush and puddles and mud. So we got lucky, spared the drippy drama of multiple winter snows. Right now the stuff is melting fast. Tinkles of water from rooftops drop like rain. The sidewalks are clearing for safe strolling. 

People walk their dogs, wearing hats and muffs and gloves, sartorially overcompensating. It’s not that cold. But let them believe. Who knows when, or if, we’ll get blanketed in the white stuff again. Next month. Next year. Never.

This could so be me.

A brief winter reverie

~ Chris ~ 1 Comment

A crisp Sunday morning and gaggles of children hoot, holler and gambol outside. It is the sound of chaos. (And, to these gentle ears, terror.) 

Temperatures are far higher than the last couple of freezing days. At 47 degrees, the sky is a glowing gray, sun struggling to burn through the haze. A fine winter day.

The children are out at last, released from the arctic prison imposed by the polar vortex, or whatever hit us with only a whisper of snow, for which we’re grateful. Snow is lovely, until it’s a big brown Slurpee. 

It will hit 60 later this week, an unwelcome augur of springtime. I’m all about the 40s and 50s. I have plans to go to Florence, Italy, in one week and the forecast says low 50s and I couldn’t be happier. I can see you frowning, and I don’t care.

But spring is a’coming. I had a dream last night that colorful leaves — red! green! yellow! — were blossoming on naked winter branches. A dream? More of a nightmare. 

So save for the one-day dusting, there’s been no snow this season. The children above — those huggable hellions — have been deprived of sledding and hurling balls and making snowmen, however virtuosically deformed the creatures invariably turn out.

It’s been a mostly mellow winter, a zigzag of 20s to 60s, so heat lovers and outliers like me can split the difference. That rotund rodent Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow a few days ago, ergo we are promised — blessed with — six more weeks of winter, they say.

Hang tight. All this brisk glory will soon be usurped by sun and sweat and pollen and long days and children screeching outside and the warbling tune of the ice cream truck and picnics and baseball and tank tops and flip-flops and other fashion misdemeanors. It’s going to be a massacre. For now, I’ll do what I can: just chill with the chill.

Snow job

~ Chris ~ 4 Comments

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It looked like a pillow fight in a movie: downy feathers of snow twisting and drifting through the air, with little space between the fluttering flakes. A midday flurry making landfall in heaps and mounds. 

Yet it wasn’t too voluminous, this late-winter coating, and instead of pillowy tufts, the following day offers equal parts splash and crunch. Anything beautiful about the snow has thawed into a slurry swamp. Walking the dog, we slalomed around slush and brown puddles resembling polluted ponds. My sneakers got wet. 

Slush, rivers of slush.

I love winter. I like the cold. But I can do without snow, which wasn’t true during my salad days of skiing down vertiginous slopes, laughing all the way. Nowadays I’m too reserved to even toboggan, and I am not squatting in one of those saucer sleds for the certainty that I will break my collar bone in a spectacular face plant. 

Snow now means shoveling, one of the lowest forms of drudgery, right there with prisoners smashing quarry rocks in old-timey pictures like “I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang.” No matter how frigid it is, I sweat piggishly when shoveling snow. I hate sweating. I hate heat. Did I mention I like winter?

But the season will soon cruelly vanish and shorts, a sartorial scandal, will be all the rage. It’s probable more snow will fall before that; March often gets dumped on without mercy. If there was a hill around here, I’d rent some skis. (And probably snap a femur.) 

So this is a premature farewell to the fair season, when we abide icy irritants for the relievedly short days, chilly breezes, hot toddies, fashionable outerwear (is anything hipper than a natty scarf?) and indiscriminate cuddling. (About outerwear: I never don gloves or hats in winter. My mammalian blood takes care of the extremities, ears too.)

When another snow day comes this season, I will gripe and groan. But I will also be grateful that it’s still winter. That I can wear a parka with impunity. That I don’t have to attend barbecues and eat outdoors. That bugs and sunshine won’t assail me. And that I can, joyfully, unabashedly, freeze my ass off.

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Spring’s baffling, irritating volatility

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

Easter Sunday’s unambiguous spurt of spring — vigorous sunshine, 60 degrees, itsy Technicolor blossoms dimpling New York’s Central Park — now has the Monday doldrums. Snow — we got more snow. Some six inches. It’s April 2. What are we, Michigan, Montana, the Alps? 

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This …

Spring seems uncertain if she wants to touch down and nestle in. She’s circling, weighing her options. She is fickle and flighty and flirty:

Here’s some sun and a teasing 50 degrees, cloudless and dry, she says. Now here’s a spritz of rain, 30 degrees, sky gun-metal-gray and cloud-clogged. And here, ha ha, are bluffs of sticky snow. Deal. I’ll be getting my nails done.  

Winter’s a bitch. Spring may be bitchier, for now. The season’s schizophrenic whiplash hurtles like a clattering, climatic rollercoaster. And for many people, it’s no fun at all. 

Climate change is irrefutably jumbling normal seasonal patterns. The erratic weather impacts swaths of natural phenomena, from plant blossoms arriving at the wrong time to dangerous tidal levels to the destruction of lucrative crops.

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… or this? Spring’s maddening indecision.

It is 35 degrees as I write this.

It will be 65 degrees, with rain, on Wednesday.

Amidst all this I’m supposed to be ruffled. I am not. I don’t like that the 70s and 80s are impending. I don’t like that it gets dark at 8 p.m., and soon 9 p.m. I embrace the 40s and 50s. I relish an early dusk. (At times in the Arctic Circle, they don’t see the sun for weeks. Glorious.)

Yesterday’s taste of true spring, the one we’ll soon be stuck with, was like a warning shot telling me I’m in for months of bright, hot discomfort. For everyone else it was a harbinger of heaven, petal-strewn paradise, a fantasia for flip-flops. They can have it. Or at least when spring decides to figure herself out, cut the confusion, and finally land.

Spring is here. Hello snow.

~ Chris ~ Leave a comment

We’re getting socked in. It’s the second day of spring, officially, and snow is coming down at a canted angle, in flurries of tattered cotton, looking almost fake, like white confetti, not wispy crackles of ice that cling to eyelashes. It’s moving fast and dense, and those fluffy pale piles outside are growing into ominous bulging heaps. For those of us with snow shovels in their future, this flatly blows.

The forecasts are bing-boingy, all over the place, predicting everything from eight to 16 inches — hardly a snow-pocalypse, but resolutely a pain and undeniably an inconvenience. Schools are out. Roads are tricky and perilous. Housebound, there is nowhere to go.

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Yet it’s so pretty.

I’ve groused before: I’m not a fan of spring or summer. So I should be euphoric. But there’s this: I also don’t like snow. When I skied in my teens in California, of course I loved it. As a child hurling snowballs: same. Now, while I still find it aesthetically unassailable — it radiates an ethereal beauty — snow really comes down to an extravagant shambles marked by danger, wetness, slush and mush. And, you got it, shoveling.

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Then again …

It doesn’t snow all that much here. This isn’t Canada. Which makes us fairly wussy about the white stuff, a bit whiny and bleating. It’s all about proportion, and I think we’re handling today’s dumping with a dash of composure, a smidge of sangfroid. (Wait till the shovels come out. Grown men will weep.)

This mass deposit from the heavens should be mostly melted away by, oh, Sunday or Monday. But wait. I just now peeked at the forecast. It shows cartoon snowflakes falling tomorrow — snowflakes, so wondrous and horrible, flittering down on the land, sitting pretty, and oh so monstrously.