Wet snow, plopping
Soft snow, drifting
Quiet snow, muffling
My corner of the world
We don’t get much snow in Seattle, but I’m not in Seattle as I write this. I’m tucked away, a little stay-cation, in a cabin in the woods, by a lake, and this morning I woke to snow.
Growing up, snow was a fact of winter. Every winter. Multiple times. The plows were hard at work, piling burms down the center of each street from well before dawn til after dark. One winter, the snow from our driveway alone became an entire season’s entertainment. Digging out the center of a densely packed pile, we made a fort, massive in my memory, the inside iced over by hours of patient breathing, close and hot.
Making snow forts was a common pass-time for little me. As a kid I spent hours sneaking snacks, staying up late reading fantasy novels, and playing in the snow. We spent hours sledding the big hill by the school, skiing with bus loads of other kids, and hollowing out every mound and pile that presented itself.
As a teenager, there was a little less playing, but it stayed a feature of every year. Snow days came few and far between in a land with that many plows, but the chance to stay in bed and binge a new series (of books. Netflix still only served a few discs at a time) was always welcome.
And the winter sun. My God do I miss the winter sun.
Seattle is great in many ways, and it being a city of hills, it’s good that it only ices over once or twice a year, and not for long. But I miss the dazzle of crisp cold sunshine off white snow. That a time of year with such little feeling of sun had the power to amplify it helped us all stay a little brighter when days were short.
Seattle doesn’t have it, so I had to range a bit farther a field to find it. I’ve got a long weekend of deliberate rest, a chance to read and write and relax in a way that I can’t in the city. I almost always have something I need to do on any given day. Laundry, a meeting with a patron, networking, advertising, exercising… it’s hard for me to feel truly leisurely.
Out here, away, there are still things to do. But none are time-bound, and that offers an emotional and intellectual rest, unlike the many but broken hours of free time scattered into my usual routine.
And so to wake up when my body felt like it, and find snow gently veiling the window, was a treat.
It’ll be short lived. It’s already melting. I can hear the pitter-patter-thump of soggy clumps hitting the roof every time a tree sneezes. But for now the world is clean. The lake is a crisp expanse in the near distance. The only sounds are the ticking of the clock, which I ignore, and of my keyboard, which I enjoy. Later there will be a fire in the fireplace. S’mores. Perhaps a game or two.
Later
Now? Let it snow.