It’s difficult to breathe, today. The winter cold has got me. Sore throat, watery eyes, sneezing, coughing, aching. I’m starting to sound like that commercial. I feel insulted by this cold, coming so soon after the crash. Hasn’t my body been through enough? I could forgive it, I think, if only we had snow.
That’s the trouble with living in Virginia, snow is almost mythical. Because it actually does snow once every few years, it makes this myth compelling. If it never snowed, I could give up and forget about pristine walks through the blanketed silence, my over-sized boots making the first prints on the virgin road. When it is that quiet in the world, my mind takes on an easy peace. I walk and watch the snow flakes fall, drifting unhurried through the skeletal branches, falling toward the rest of their mates waiting quietly on this earth; each flake unique when you catch it in your palm, and study it quickly before it melts away.
When I was little I lived in Colorado. Snow was a given there. We got blizzards, where you risked not making it home if you were even a few miles down the road from where you lived. The light was blinding off that white mass of ground, with a barren bowl of blue sky overhead and without the looming trees to block the glare.
In my new native home, the trees huddle under the white coverlet, a sheltered canopy, adding to the hush of winter. I have friends who live in Michigan and Chicago who will say they would happily give me some of their snowfall to spare their backs, bent from shoveling, and their ice-chapped faces, and their bone-cold way of living through the winters of the North.
Still, I long for snow. No matter what they tell me of hardship, and having to wear too many coats and scarfs, hats, boots, and gloves. There is an angel deep inside me, just waiting for her patch of white, and my willingness to lie down on that plain bedding and allow her to be born.
Through all this winter’s cold, I long for snow.
Lakshmi Bertram 