Pluto 2/5
First Snow
Those forgotten years! The harder I try to remember, the bluer the scent becomes.
But I do remember a story my father told me about my first winter with them: It was bitterly cold, the coldest anyone could remember, with snow falling non-stop for three days until over six feet lay on the ground. I had to shovel a narrow path from the house so we could get out to the car.
The snow was so high on either side that I couldn’t see the top of it. Three years old, did I have an instinctive fear of avalanches? Or did I sense my future waiting for me at the top of that flight of icy steps?
Boys my age wanted to be firemen, or home-run hitters, but I wanted to be a meteorologist. I couldn’t even pronounce the word, but I wanted to be one. I decided to find out everything I could about the weather. Which city had the coldest temperature at night. Where the most snow fell.
And why Cleveland never won at anything.
I was determined to see the first snowflake of winter, and to chart the longest number of days in a row that snow clung on before the melt. No one I knew cared about any of this, but that just made me more determined
One winter a king snow would come again, and the memories flood back like a spring thaw.
Left to chance, though, it never happened. The moisture might be in the clouds, but the temperature betrayed them and turned the snow to sleet before it hit the ground. Precious moments of youth, gone.
There’s nothing that scientists can teach me about the dangers of global warming.
Snowpath
The boy has dreamt this:
igloo – a clean sculpt of knife on brick sweet burn of driftwood for body heat sizzle of salmon in the pan yellow eyes pacing the margins.
But no such metaphors this far south –
here snowfall has a clock of its own
and a sudden dump may trigger a thaw.
So the boy is ready when it comes.
At first light he’s stamping out
an arterial to magnetic north
retracing, sliding sideways
to harden the path. Even as
the snow tries to overwrite
his sketches with sculpted drifts
but he has an instinct for the brittle
under powder and ploughs on
smoothing, banking to speed,
gauging the lesson of snow fence,
no thought of friends still asleep
to avoid the nuisance of cold.
His mother’s last call to breakfast
is a drizzle beyond the white-out
and no easy cave will distract him now
from that stench of wolf just ahead.