There were drifts up to the rooftops

On the way to the post office.  Around ten this morning.  Wednesday, February 10, 2010. Click to enlarge.

At the library the other day, talking with the librarians and another patron about the predicted storm on the way.  A whole foot, maybe two might get dumped on us.  The eldest librarian laughed.

“Two feet?  That’s nothing,” she said.

The other patron, a man I judged to be nearing eighty, agreed.

“Not like when I was a kid,” he said.  “I remember snowstorms, my father had to climb out the bedroom window and let himself down from the porch roof so he could shovel a path to the front door.  The snow was that high.”

The librarian is well into her sixties.  She remembered similar snowstorms from when she was a girl and a young woman.  She remembered her children jumping off the roof of the neighbor’s garage into the drifts below.  The drop wasn’t more than a few feet.

I had my own memories to add, of wading through snow drifts up to my waist, of the mountain of snow the plows built at the foot of our front yard after every snow storm because we were at the bottom of a cul de sac, of snow forts with walls high enough to stop invasions of Mongol hordes, with several rooms inside connected by long and perfectly rounded tunnels, of falling backwards into the snow to make snow angels and sinking so deep that the world around me was lost from view and all I could see was the gray sky straight overhead and the blue walls of my outline.

But I didn’t add them.  I was stopped by the sudden doubt that those memories were real or that they were even mine.

My memories of those mountains of snow in our yard, they look suspiciously like a snapshot in our family album.  And the snow forts as I remember them are impossibly elaborate and the tunnels go on forever with more branches than a gold mine in a Western.  And how did I make any headway through snow that was up to my waist?  I’d have had to have been a little steam engine.

And what specific snowstorms did I think I was remembering?  Was it just one that I’ve let fill in for all the storms that blew through the winters of my childhood?  Was it a combination of the best memories of all those winters?  Was what I was picturing in my head a work of art, images created and re-created out of things I had been told, read, seen in photographs and home movies?

I kept quiet because I was so full of self-doubt that the only thing I was sure of was that whatever I said would probably be a lie or as good as one.

It snowed when I was a kid.  I had a good time when it did.  That’s all I knew for certain.  Didn’t seem like it would do much to improve the conversation.

I shut my mouth and just listened to the old man and the librarian move on to stories of sledding down streets emptied of cars by the snow.

We’re having some snow today.  Nowhere near what was forecast, so far.  Maybe four inches, and it’s tapering off.  There’ll be no jumping off any roofs into the drifts.

But maybe I’ll go out and make a snow angel.

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The old black dog comes in one evening
with the first few snowflakes on his back
and falls asleep, throwing his bad leg out
at our excitement. This is the night
when one of us gets to say, as if it were news,
that no two snowflakes are ever alike;
the night when each of us remembers something
snowier. The kitchen is a kindergarten
steamy with stories. The dog gets stiffly up
and limps away, seeking a quiet spot
at the heart of the house. Outside,
in silence, with diamonds in his fur,
the winter night curls round the legs of the trees,
sleepily blinking snowflakes from his lashes.

---First Snow by Ted Kooser

______________

M.A. Peel has found an eyewitness account of a long-ago blizzard.  Warning: a sock to the gut and a tear in the eye at the end.

Comments

[Susie from Philly]

I was thinking about this myself, and what I definitely remember is that the snow was up to the top of the wrought-iron fence in our yard. I remember hopping the fence (it was easier, because of the snow) and making my way up our alley to the candy store. And yes, the snow was waist high - in grownup retrospective, about 30" high.

We used to have big storms all the time. What people don't seem to understand about climate change is that it's unnatural to have had the mild winters of the past decade.

[Linkmeister]

From a blog post a long time back, when I'd put up a new theme every once in a while:

The last time I lived where it snowed every winter was 1962-1968 in DC. One of my lasting memories is of having a paper route delivering the now-defunct Washington Star during what was called the Blizzard of 1966. The paper was an afternoon daily with a Sunday morning edition; one Saturday it started to snow on top of the foot or so already on the ground. By Sunday morning when I got up to deliver the papers it was about three feet deep and drifting. I finally got the Sunday papers on the following Wednesday.

That memory I know is true.

[actor212]

When the snow was at your waist, how tall were you?

I remember drifts over my head, but I was a short kid.

[mac macgillicuddy]

We lived at the end of a cul de sac, too (of course, in those days, nobody said "cul de sac" yet; we just called it a "circle" but that's not this story). The plows piled the snow high and we dug tunnels into the mountains, played on top of them, and went down their slopes in snow saucers. Probably, the mountain of snow I remember piled up over several plowings, and across several snows, the driver putting all of the snow from the circle in the same place either because it was easier for him to turn that way in the truck, or because he liked the thought of building a mountain for the neighborhood kids (of which there were many). Perhaps both.

We had a lot of fun. It doesn't matter how tall we were relative to the memories. Snow seemed less menacing then. Now, I'm almost 52, and all I think about when it snows if what happens if I fall down.

Which makes the snow seem huge no matter how deep it gets.

[CJColucci]

I remember the difficulties of shoveling snow when the drifts are taller than I was, and the techniques I had to adopt, so at least some of my memories of blizzards past must be pretty close to true.