Childhood snow is fluffy, powdery and playful.
Creating frolicking, rollicking, toboggan-tumbling cushioned slopes.
A snow that moulds and melds itself into spherical missiles
for serious playground warfare
amongst teenaged sparring folks.
Youthful snow drips and ripens into xylophone icicles
Hanging, glittering and glistening with melodies.
See-through stalactite-y structures,
mingle with Christmas lights
leaving them a tad tawdry.
Early morning snow is silent, pristine, uncharted territory
Where no dog-walker or mailman hath trod before.
That means the twins next door are Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta today,
discovering new lands.
With their yellow rubber wellington boot imprints, they explore.
Soon they'll open the annual "Build a Snowman" workshop.
With crunchy carrot noses and branches for forearms.
With a Salvation Army-bound muffler they will adorn him.
While he stares stonily ahead,impotent.
like some cautionary idol from the story of Abraham.
Childhood snow is a creamy, dreamy carpet
Where angels gather and flap mitten-covered wings.
Pom-pommed, Wal-mart acrylic beanies shelter their frozen halos,
And sips of cocoa warm these celestial third grade beings.
But grown up snow is different.
It is older, wiser, more sensible.
It knows what's best for you.
It is a because I said so snow.
It is jaded, numbed, hardened; hurts on contact.
It is a winter weather advisory, tempestuous snow,Causing a slushy, mushy black and brown river to flow.
She calls it "hazardous driving conditions- better stay indoors" snow.
She fears being cardiac-arrested, broken legged and frostbitten-toed.
She aches from an arthritic, thermal-wearing, shivering-why are my limbs moving so slow woe.
From her window she spies
a jammed intersection, swervy, nervy, slippy slidey show,
A cock-roach-like, verminesque, nuisance
to be shoveled,
hacked at and
annihilated with salt scoops and
riding tractors
till it melts and is overthrown.
But she closes her eyes to recall the chilly, sweet taste of a childhood snowflake.
Dust off her rusty sled, walk across the lawn for a different view.
She may let glassy crystalled snowflakes cover her,
find out what her young neigbors are doing,
try to glimpse what their gleaming eyes are seeing.
And might just wonder at winter anew.
5 comments:
Well perhaps some women may wish to wonder anew. Others will be purchasing airline tickets to Florida online.
Well written. A descriptive, symphonic ode to the wintry blues. Yes, we need to cease complaining and see the wonderment through a child's perspective...
So, "Do you wanna build a Snowman?" ..... (I have seen Disney's Frozen twice!!!)
Many, many thanks for this lovely, evocative ode…
Ah, the charm of remembering childhood snow.
Sledding - remember sleds? With blades that you could skewer your siblings with if you weren't careful?
And toboggans - the long kind that you could fit 5 or 6 kids on, and the last one on usually ended up left behind halfway down the hill?
But my favorite, my very favorite memory of snow is the one where Dad hooks up the pony to the sleigh - yes, we had one - and we bundle into it covered with blankets - and that pony pulls us all around the field.
And now I wonder if my father can even remember doing that anymore, and if any children will ever ride in horse-drawn sleighs again….
Children, and horses, and sleighs, and fathers come and go. But there will always be the snow.
Thanks Namesake.
And JL. What a scene you've evoked of an almost bygone era.
"Children, and horses, and sleighs, and fathers come and go. But there will always be the snow."
Gulp.
Those icicles look suspiciously familiar...
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