For anyone who lives where early January brings—almost reliably even now—the first major snowfall, there is a feeling that everything is right with the world—politically, emotionally, even environmentally. Here in Northern New Mexico where we’ve suffered extreme drought for the past five years, today’s snow means a little relief for the parched earth as it slowly sinks in and nourishes the desiccated ground.
And yes, I can almost forgive the presence of that big new house on a foothill where it should never have been built and would not have been built twenty years ago when Stewart Udall was still alive and our local ordinances were enforced—no mountain top building!—before the developers got into the cock bird’s seat and the old rules fell before them.
But I can forget all that at least for the moment, wipe from my reflections the last four years of poison, and watch Pip racing through the snow on the wide soft trail, under the pines, as a delicate scrim of snow begins to fall.
I remember the Robert Frost poem I’ve always loved, dismissing criticism that his poetry is easy—”The Land was Ours Before We Were The Land’s” (“The Gift Outright”) is an example of his complexity—and repeat his “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”:
Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village though
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
Or, more ominously, perhaps, the extraordinary Conrad Aiken short story, “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”, told from the point of view of a twelve-year-old boy, an only child in a conventional London family, who begins to retreat into his own world, thinking, “Was it wrong of him to want to have a place of his own?”—a mental stronghold his parents can’t penetrate?
Alarmed, they call in a doctor who finds nothing wrong with the boy—and some commentators explain the story as a descent into mental illness. With its extraordinary description of snow falling over London, it seems to me to be about the birth of a poet—the ones among us who need to escape what we call reality.
Snow at the end of James Joyce’s short story, “The Dead,” in his early collection, Dubliners, crowns the narrator’s crisis of discovery: his wife loved a long-dead young man, Michael Furey, as she never has and never will love him.
“Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, falling softly into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.”
So, I celebrate the blessing of snow, first as it nourishes the dry land, and then, no less significantly, as it supplies metaphors for poetry and fiction—and a white playground for Pip to romp in.
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