I Remember Snow

I'm thirty-seven.

I live just outside of a city and often find myself driving into or out of town on a six-lane highway with a grassy median. Sometimes I listen to podcasts or music, but often I just drive and think. More than once, recently, I've caught myself thinking about a particular winter when I was a kid.

My childhood was strange. Not to me, but to most people that I know now. We lived in places far from other families and electricity was a luxury that we mostly did without. For a few years, we lived in the edge of a national forest, and I spent a lot of time tramping about in the woods with my siblings, playing with sticks and rocks when other kids our age were playing games and sports with friends.

One winter it started snowing and just didn't stop. It snowed for days, until every tree was bent under the weight of it. We didn't have power or gas at the time, so our house was heated by wood and a kerosene heater. Some neighbor told my dad about a tree that had fallen down nearby, and we took a chainsaw and set out to find it, leaving the truck at home because we were on top of a mountain and the roads were dangerous.

We bundled up, layering coats over knit shirts over T-shirts, and pulling my mother's handmade toboggan caps (We called them "boggans") down low over our ears before we traipsed out through knee deep snow to find the tree.

I don't remember much else about that little expedition. It was nothing. Barely a story. What I do remember is the deep stillness of the forest. No trucks were driving or animals stirring. The snow muffled everything and left the forest a quiet, meditative place where people were only tolerated if they could survive. Despite the roads carving through the hills, for a while, that mountain wasn't our place. It wasn't a place meant for people.

I drive through traffic every day, staring at slowly browning checkerboard squares of sod and close cut grass littered with cigarette butts. Every year, snow becomes more scarce and the stars are harder to see through street lamps and the ever-present glow on the horizon.

And I miss the snow.