Snow

By Matthew Wherttam

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The morning after an oversized blizzard on Long Island, my brothers and I stuffed ourselves into our heaviest winter clothing and then tried and failed to open our front door, which was piled high with snow. And so was our back door. The windows on our first floor were frosted over, and upstairs, where we got our first good view of all of it, we found that the snow had arranged itself around our neighborhood in swells and dips and furrows and ridges. Shrubs, tree branches, walls, and roofs were now white, and all that white carried only a few footprints and paw prints. Our mailbox was a curious-looking hump.

So we went back downstairs where we couldn't open our garage door—another thing piled high with snow. Frankly, I can't recall how we got outside, but I do remember us throwing snowballs, making a snowman, building a snow fort, and getting cold, wet, and shivery. We were burying and unburying ourselves in the stuff, and some of it was still blowing around. But at least things were not blustery, as they had been the night before. The fences between us and our friends' houses were hidden in white, and where the sidewalk ended and the street began was a mystery. The order and monotony of a usual day were gone, and while, at that young age, we weren't thinking in those exact words, we were certainly feeling the opposite of boredom. The storm had set us free. Sent us into a frenzy. Things were now wild. Wild, but soft. Muffled. With no cars driving by. We could go wherever we wanted, but getting anywhere was hard work. The snow was high and kept collapsing over the tops of our boots and sinking onto our shoes and socks.

But still we tore through every new drift we were able to get to.

It was a carnival. A white carnival. White and largely deserted. And we were rioting in it. We were having too much fun. Doing everything and nothing. Our heads hooded and our faces covered with scarves.

Was it a weekday? If so, it was surely a snow day, away from the classroom and school. Had we done any shoveling? If we had, then when the town's snowplow finally came through, it surely put back most of the snow we had been able to clear away. Was the snow powdery? It couldn't have been that powdery. We had made snowballs with it. Were there birds above? I can't recall. Was the sky bright and blue, or were there clouds in it? And how long did we stay out that winter day? And, finally, am I remembering just one storm or remembering bits and pieces of several of them?

…..

Thousands of years ago the winter storms came one after another and melted and hardened and kept melting and hardening … weighing down the soil and rock below them, pushing and scraping it all southward into what is now Long Island. And, as you can see, that is where my story started.