Snow

A Story by Rudy Kindling

an essay about snow

I remember when I was five years old, and snow was a white, light thing that danced around the wind. I used to point at it and implore others to look, look! Look how softly it nestles upon the streets, blanketing everything you see with white! On its white canvas we would carve winged angels, expanded from the outlines of our own images; fitting, as young children we were as close to angels as we’d ever be. Then we’d mold perfect little spheres with our tiny hands, to be sent tumbling towards our friends as playful little gifts.

And now, I look out the window at the snow and my head fills up with the consequences of things.

The shoveling, the plowing, the slipping, the falling, the colors, ever-darkening, the ice, ever-blackening, a day off from work, a day off from school, a day extending the weekend from two to three - and I stop to catch my breath, before it escapes my lips as vaporized anguish.

When did I lose my hold upon the moment?

When was it that I obsessed to entrench myself further and further down the timeline, to comb through the worries and fears that spring out from the mysteries of the projectable yet unknowable future? Was there a switch I could flip to return to when my glee was most complete, when I could only see as far as the moment unfolded before me? When snow was just snow, nothing more and nothing less?