snow

I woke to a rare urban blizzard early this morning, the snow flooding my city street. I watch as an intrepid traveler wades down the middle of the avenue, floating through the river of white that, if only for a moment, covers so much concrete. I can’t stop staring at it. All this snow on a Saturday feels like a lost opportunity. Why can’t it be Monday or Thursday? I feel a bit like I’m seven years old again, hoping that the blizzard will mean a snow day. A day when everything is paused, when we make hot chocolate and melt marshmallow in the microwave.

So I curl up with Margaret Fuller – that great lioness of the 19th century who died early at sea with a babe in her arms and a manuscript that would never be found – and the snow and my memory get all tangled in my Saturday morning brain. She says that, “none but poets remember their youth,” and I think that it takes this blizzard, that it takes all of this snow, for me to remember my own youth.

At once I’m back in a car – I think that it’s 1979 – and we’re all headed out somewhere, downstate perhaps, but the snow comes harder than anyone could have imagined. I’m curled up with a blanket and I can see just a tiny clear hole through the rear window. The rest is white. The trip, I think I know, is canceled. We take refuge at my father’s office or maybe it was a gas station. But we stop. The snow is too much. I can just feel being warm and surrounded, perfectly unaware of danger, just warm and surrounded.

And so I take a long, hot bath and wonder what else this snow will remember for me.