We’re in the dregs of winter these days—below freezing most nights, relatively warm most days with rain more frequent than snow. Additional snow, which we expect, has lost its ability to intimidate (unless you live in a flood zone). Our formerly unassailable snowpack is melting daily, revealing bedraggled lawns, silty sidewalks and forgotten snowman accessories. It’s messy, wet, and muddy. The remaining snow (of which there is still a good bit) is crusty and dingy gray.
As much as I am looking forward to the beauty and warmth of spring and summer, I will truly miss winter. It feels like sacrilege to say this around here (where everybody is completely sick of it), but I loved the snowy coldness of it all. My pre-dawn walk to work in the bitter cold has been one of my most treasured times of day. For one thing, it is stunningly beautiful outside. It is dark, but the snow reflects so much light that it never feels gloomy. After a fresh snowfall, everything is white, even the middle of the street. All the urban grime is replaced with glittering silver. As I trudge through the sidewalk canyons, flanked by thigh- or shoulder-high snowbanks, my inner geek goes wild: I’m listening for Mr. Tumnus in Narnia or avoiding storm troopers on Hoth. (Little do my students know that “Mr. Roy” regularly takes out imperial AT-ATs with his lightsaber before school.) If I’m lucky enough to catch the moon still up, I get the visual treat of moonlight through ice-limned branches—the light refracts in such a way to make the straight branches look like they bend to encircle the moon.
On these walks I am often surprised by how life-affirming this dead time of year is. No matter how dark and cold it is, there are always rabbit prints in the snow ahead of mine, and often the rabbits themselves. What do they eat? I have no idea. Then, as the eastern stars fade away, the birds start emerging. That just boggles my mind—how is it possible that the tiny, delicate things don’t freeze solid overnight? But they’re out, chirping happily and heading to their favorite birdfeeders. Cool.
Then there’s the cars-as-ballerinas effect. To understand this you need to understand that I don’t like cars. I think they are great tools, and I can appreciate (I suppose) a particularly well-designed automobile, but for the most part I hate them. They are dirty, noisy, and usually in my way. This is true whether I’m in a car or on foot, but as a pedestrian they are especially annoying because they are so much more dangerous and so much less respectful.
Winter helps with this on a number of levels. First of all, drivers are all freaked out. The roads are terrible. It’s tough getting out of your driveway, not to mention managing to stop at a light or start again afterwards. Everybody is sliding every which way and their confidence is shot. (Forgive me for getting a bit of amusement out of this.) Add to that the fact that the snow and my layers of scarves and hats also dampens sound. Put together the combination of slow driving, relative silence, lights reflecting off the snow, and the oddly graceful slip-sliding of tires and you have a transformation of the banal reality of winter traffic into an ethereal ballet. I kid you not: I have been stopped in my tracks by the silent beauty of oncoming headlights through the snow. (That is until I have to cross a street, when beautiful or not, they revert back into me-hunting demons.)
Finally, on some days it is just about sheer survival. On the very coldest mornings, when windchills have dropped into the negative 20s or worse, I’m not thinking about lightsabers or birds or ballet, I’m just focused on making sure my eyes don’t freeze shut and watching where I put my feet so I can get to school as quickly as possible. Arrival, under these circumstances, feels like a victory. And that’s not a bad way to start a school day.