Snow day
The snow finally came today, after months of my kids whining. In their minds winter means snowmen, snowball fights, sledding, and tracking animals. I’d grown scared that climate change might leave these expectations perpetually disappointed.
It packs well. I had the baby in the carrier so we didn’t throw many snowballs at each other. We used the side of our trash can as a target, aiming at the city logo on the side, then went to the back yard to build a snowman with spindly stick arms. My kids rolled handfuls of snow into boulders then called me to supervise as they lifted the boulders into place, bringing our snowman to identifiable form out of dispersed elements. I went it to collect a carrot to make a nose and poured a small glass of scotch to bring to our backdoor neighbor who was out shoveling. The kids gave the snowman a face and the baby laughed. I delivered the scotch and we made small talk about whether the government shutdown would delay the tax returns we hoped to spend on scotch, then about home insulation and learning to live with the cold that comes with old houses. We renewed our perpetual “we should eventually hang out” just as my kids demanded I intervene immediately to help shore up the snowman’s nose; the large carrot had begun to droop.
We packed more snow around the carrot and my oldest found bits of leaf and twig to make eyes and a zipper, saying something like “traditional snowmen have buttons but no one has buttons on their coat nowadays, this snowman lives today.” I stepped back to admire the forward thinking man of frozen water and accidentally walked on the mound of leaves under the snow. A few weeks ago we noticed a hole burrowed in the top of the leave pile. We decided to leave it there so as not to disturb what I hope is a chipmunk and not a rat or snake. My five year old looked worried I’d stepped on whatever it was, and said I should pay more attention to animals like she does. The baby began to fuss so I said I was taking her in. The kids said they’d come too. My oldest decided to finish our fun by making a snow angel. An innovator, she decided to do this one face down so it would have a face print. It worked surprisingly well - it looked good and it meant she didn’t complain about going inside as she’d partially frozen her face from the cold.
The snow meant our yard did not offer the usual harvest crop of worries. A year or two ago we killed all the grass and planted wildflowers, some of which stand over six feet high. In early july the parade of blooms, bright against their backdrop of green, justifies our choices. In late fall it looks brown, dry, disordered, skeletal - neglected. We live in a neighborhood where people have bigger problems than our weird yard, but still. One never wants to stand out or be a nuisance, unless it’s intended as a fuck you to a specific and deserving person. I want to put in a fence eventually, and maybe a bench, to underline that this is a deliberate use the yard and not dereliction.
The snow dressed up the yard nicely, softening the scraggly dried and dormant plants and wrapping the remaining seed-heads into small clusters of white at different heights. It looked a bit like a snapshot of the snow storm. For the whole outing I didn’t think about yard, work, money, home maintenance, aging, and so on. The snow muted all that clamor, my mind staying full of that snowfall shushing sound even after we returned indoors, for easily a full five or maybe even ten minutes.