first snows

I.
An email from an old college friend alerted me to the fact that it was snowing here in New York.  I have no windows and had no idea; my world is florescent.  (My only relief, a postcard of Steamers and Sailing Ships pinned to the wall, isn't even a picture but an expression, so doubly internal.)  I staggered outside to see snow dropping thickly and smokers taking refuge against the glass walls.  Across the street, the park, usually so rowdy and anarchic, had, at least for the moment, been tamed by the snow: everyone seemed to have obeyed the directive that closed the parks, and the vast round plaza in the center, empty and white, looked from edges like some Narnian fantasy.

Hostas, planted in clusters, were hunched over and shriveled in misery, but contrary to popular belief, snow isn't bad for perennials, and, apart from the weight of wet snow, it isn't necessarily bad for trees, either.  Excepting hothouse tropical specimens, perennials will tolerate the snow well enough; it actually serves as a sort of insulation against the cold.  It's the freezing and thawing, the cycle of harshness and hope, that kills things.

II.

My sophomore year of college, a winter storm shut down campus for a solid week.  The week before, a light dusting, perhaps a few inches, had sufficed to close the public schools, which caused all the midwesterners to snicker; but this was an honest-to-goodness blizzard, a full 3 feet of snow.  Our Southern city had neither snowplows nor salt.  (When, five days later, I ventured out using four-wheel drive, I passed a single golf cart improvising as a plow, a shovel afixed to its front, plying its lonely route, back and forth, across vast, oceanic parking lots.)  For the time being, there was nowhere to go and no way to get there.  The campus bar ran dry in two days.

The morning after the storm, I met my friend A. in the Gardens.  At 9 o'clock, the Gardens were silent and still and nearly untouched: the whole campus seemed to be asleep.  (And probably was; see above: the campus bar ran dry.)  Undisturbed snow always feels like discovering something secret, and here it was smooth and velvety, padding the hills and capping the wisteria terrace.  Only a few footprints suggested that anyone else existed in the world: their owners had carefully built a snowCaesar, wreath on his head and stick-arms extended in shock as Brutus stabbed him in his icy back.   I remember thinking, Only we know this.  I took a picture of A. smiling beneath the bent-over boughs of a fir tree near the hollow where the old weeping-willow used to grow; and now it is gone and she is gone.  Somewhere I must still have the photo.