Chatham Nature Writing Blog: Place #3 Entry

I always want to be elsewhere when it snows. Not because I dislike the winter shawl, but because of how much I adore it. I have looked out my window onto this same yard for eleven winter seasons of my own and countless winter days when my grandparents owned this house. Somewhere, elsewhere, snow in Chardon, Ohio, or West Allis, Wisconsin, or Ithaca, New York, must be different. Landscapes as varied as the people I could meet lie under snow in patterns and shoots and gaps and hollows and hills of every angle and reflection the Earth can conjure or man create.

Snow is non-discriminatory, and my yard reflects no prejudice today in angles slanted, circles rounded, flat-tops flattened. Everything, from the kids’ slide to the covered air-conditioning unit to the roof above the porch, holds the snow in its exact pattern, as if either the falling mist had been too tired to go farther down or if each branch, each rock, each clump of dirt insisted on impressing its embossment upon the snow in an upward thrust. Even the roof, built as if an uneven piano had been placed next to the house, gives its shape to snow. Keys C D E F G A B C are staggered so that it would read C d E f G a B c, if it were in positions of ups and downs, and the snow had fallen into place in just the same lazy way, the ups are up and the downs are down.

The snow has returned, as if nature’s fury had a summer rental somewhere in the south and left early from vacation to come home. We have seen a wet season, but not a cold one, not by any stretch. This “winter” would stand meager in any record book that traces the highs and lows of the day’s airy climb on a thermostatic scale. Had season climes been “normal,” we would be housed under a few feet of snow. The echoless depths of winter would be rampant. But not this year. The rain throughout January was marked with teeming intensity, spring-like sprinkles and even summer’s thunderclap as enough rain fell to make up for all those times we sang that song, “Rain, rain, go away – come again some other day.” The ledger is clear, so let the children sing again. They must have dried a lot of summer days away because these past months had no winter snow, just rain.

This weekend finally brought the snow we had wanted since before Christmas. Pennsylvania’s purest has drifted down from the sky in white and slanted bands, tufts sprawling headlong toward the yard. Across driveway walls, wind-cliffs of snow balance over the freshly shoveled cement as if annoying avalanches could ruin one man’s twenty-minute toil in a snap. The wind cuts in from the west and howls through the same slants of evergreens that in six months will produce the most memorable sunsets. Each grr-howl sounds like a car on its way toward someone else’s unfinished driveway, and I am constantly distracted, knowing my son is playing hockey in the street out front. It was his birthday this weekend and we gave him a hockey net – the perfect winter gift for a ten-year old Pittsburgh boy. He lobs a contraction-hardened ball toward the net and misses often enough that I fear he will chase it into the street and into the path of an oncoming car. It takes four, then five, then six whispering howls before I finally convince myself it is just the wind and not an automobile. The game goes on and the howling increases and the cold beneath my Levi’s suggests this isn’t the best day to be outside.

I think of the weather prediction from this morning’s news: 14 degrees, high only near 30, and I think of winter. What it finally means to experience winter. I don’t understand other climates because I am neither a part of those regions nor a product of their upbringing. I am Pennsylvanian through and through, and like a calendar too quick to be pulled from the wall as day gives into days as month gives way to months as year turn into years, I note the seasons. Without them I am incomplete, as if a chunk of shoveled snow is all that had been removed from a bright landscape where color no longer exists.

My life is a series of comforts and threats, no warning to severe as to run for shelter but strong enough to find safety in the warmth of furnace-forced security. I say I love winter, but I only watch the snow fall for serenity and shovel the inches away for the enjoyment of work. If I could live out here I probably wouldn’t. For as much as I am built of the Pittsburgh seasons, as much as they have become part of me, I am also indoctrinated to a soft bed, warm sheets, a hot shower and dry, dry gloves that insulate my aging hands from this winter I had longed for, this season I waited to feel again. It can stay a while, it’s a good guest.