Snow

Being up here in Big Bear with the snow coming down so gently, but relentlessly, forces me to remember my early childhood in Wisconsin. I remember the excitement of the first snow. When I was in the first grade at some nameless school, I remember going out to recess on a clear, crisp morning. I stood in the son, playing tether ball. My hands stung like everyone else's, but it was freezing cold and I just knew the first snow was about to come. It was probably October of 1977, but no matter how hard I try I cannot remember the first snow. I remember cold. I remember slushy, grey days. I remember arguments and violence. I remember clear, cold days where the puddles on the playground were sheathed with a thin coat of ice. The sunlight playing upon the irregularities of water puddles unexpectedly frozen overnight, and the next morning, school children would run across the asphalt without so much as a tiny recognition of the change in seasons. Not me, though. I saw how everything was able to change in a instant. I didn't have the words to express my newfound understanding, but I knew. I knew that the air turned cold and that winter was on its way. I knew that the beautiful snow would cover the ground; that my mom's hands would grow cold and hurt; that we would move (like always did); that the snow would come; that I, too, would grow cold.
So now I stand here, as a man, looking at the snow ; taking pictures of the snow that I send to my father as a personal revelation that I now accept that I was once a child who lived I. A snow-driven land thousands of miles from the place I rediscovered the truth about snow for the first time.