Snow!

Snow brings me such a feeling of levity. When I left the office this evening, I felt such a sense of love for the falling snow. The big flakes made me think of feathers. I didn't mind the snow getting into my eyelashes, it's been so long since I've had the pleasure. At one point as I was walking to the T, I yawned and a snowflake drifted right into my open mouth, which made me think to try and catch some on my tongue. Try as I might, I couldn't do it. I guess you do have to appreciate what comes to you.

What's odd is that I don't think I've harbored such cheer towards snow before. As a matter of fact, I remember intensely disliking it the first time a flake burned my cheek with its iciness. Still, I began the process of falling in love with it that very first winter when I walked by an oak tree one quiet night in Harvard Yard and heard the sound the snow made hitting the dry, brown leaves.

This winter has given us almost no snow, which unsettles me far more than I thought it would. In his short essay "Good Use For Bad Weather", Donald Hall wrote:

Every now and then we have an open winter, as we call it when we have no snow; it's a psychic disaster. It's disaster also for shrubs and bulbs, but it's the soul's woe because we haven't suffered enough. The earth can't emerge because it never submerged.

I know what he means. And I think that means I've become a New Englander.