There’s still magic in those drifts

I wish I could feel about winter as I did when I was a boy. The thrill of those first, tenuous flakes drifting just beyond the fingerprint-smeared windows of St. Isidore Elementary School, the knowledge that soon it would be time to dig out the ice skates, time to sand the rust from the Flexible Flyer’s steel runners, time for hot cocoa with marshmallows, snowball fights, crackling puddle ice, Christmas.

Everything about winter seemed good to me then.

But the thing that seemed best, that filled me to bursting with expectancy, was the snow, that magical element comprised of simple rain, somehow transmogrified into a complex building material suitable not just for snowballs, but igloos, forts, snowmen, angels, toboggan runs and anything else our fertile imaginations could devise.

Our imaginations could devise a lot. This was before PlayStation and Wii had begun the leeching theft, from generations of children, of their childhoods. In those dark ages, we created our own fun. Snow was our currency and by mid-winter we were filthy rich with it. We were, each of us, snow tycoons, and there was nothing we could not accomplish, no manifest destiny we could not fulfill, given a shovel, a bucket and a back yard filled with frozen precipitation.

The years passed and in time, snow’s magic faded. By my teen years, it was something to drive through, to shovel, to methodically scrape from permafrosted sidewalks.

From time to time, the magic would resurface briefly, as it did in the winter of ’78, which everyone’s been talking about lately since that was the last time we saw a winter like this.

I woke one late January morning to find the entire world, or our part of it at least, completely submerged beneath a white, sparkling ocean of snow. Nothing moved, not busses, not mail, not ambulances. Snowmobilers were recruited by hospitals to handle emergency transportation.

I was married to a beautiful, kind young woman who would later become the mother of our children. She stood about 5-feet-nothin’ — in places the drifts outside our apartment towered over her like New York skyscrapers.

But since we had little food in the house and roads clear enough to drive on were still days away, we decided to walk the mile to the neighborhood grocery. Feeling like Grizzly Adams and Paul Bunyan rolled into one, I beat a path through the chest-high drifts with Linda following in my wake.

We laughed and talked as we struggled through that crazy white wasteland. It was one of the most romantic days of my life, though perhaps it doesn’t sound like it now.

That may have been the last time snow’s unique magic cast its spell on my aging soul. If it has happened since then, I no longer remember.

As I write this, I’m sitting in my kitchen, not the office; the cold I had somehow eluded all winter has found me at last and with a vengeance. Beyond the window, snow is falling on back yard drifts that haven’t felt the trod of a human foot all winter and likely never will.

Even were I feeling well, I’d only be counting the days until spring, waiting for a season that better suits my current age and temperament. But gazing out there, at those sugary drifts made up trillions upon trillions of individual flakes — no two alike, if rumor is true — I can’t help feeling there’s some magic left in this old world still, though perhaps I’m too old to see it.

I just hope that somewhere, right this moment, a nine-year-old hand, cold and soggy within a wet woolen mitten, is creating worlds within worlds, all of them white, clean, and glistening with magic.

Contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com or go to mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com.