It Snowed Last Night

 

I’d worked all week on a story or two neatly interwoven with some clever interjections and confused conjecture on time and/or space all concluding with a wise and hopeful flourish. I was planning on touching it up a bit and publishing it and getting on with my day, but something happened…

It snowed last night.

As I look out upon it now a mountain of memory crumbles and stones and pebbles and boulders, chips and chunks of the past come at me. Fast. Jumbled. Frightening. Comforting.

All at once. In my imagined frailty I am afraid they will bury me.

I am afraid because as I age the ranges of memory seem closer, more vivid. I see a pretty girl with a giant snowflake on her eyelash, flushed in the wind and cold, waiting for a kiss – a quick flash of memory which used to bring on a wistful smile and rueful sigh now nearly leaves me on the floor as though downed by a hard blow to my body. A sob, tears.

I could continue telling you the memories of snow that assailed me this morning, and that’s the thing I have come to notice - I am less able to curate my memories, separate them, stack them here and there, hide some. Like today, along with all the bucolic, romantic scenes of snows past, came another roomful.

A silent walk home past a cemetery, alone and so cold.

A boy of twelve and, concurrently, a grown man with adult boys both reading the Frost poem marveling at the wisdom of it to learn and to share.

That haunting theme from Dr. Zhivago accompanying those long train rides through the deep snow of the vast Russian heartland joins, in my mind, the hours watching the streets of Queens fill up with snow. How?

The painful wallop of an icy snowball upside the head on a cruel frozen schoolyard.

It’s as though the tears that the wind and glare and ice and snow bring to our eyes are really for these memories past and future.

I don’t know what to do with this avalanche, I’ll never sort it out and get it put away just so. Will these mountains keep falling around and upon me? Will every pebble from the past hurt so?

 

Is this memory now?

 

Here’s a link to the Frost Poem.

The themefrom Dr. Zhivago (a movie I’d see if I were you).

And this’ll link you to some snow stories on my back pages.