Snow Day

Snow fell today. Slowly, like the first soft notes of a symphony. It built up over the hours, dancing through verse and chorus, unhurried and delicate. The gray streets became bright with a fresh coat of winter. The temperatures lingered right around comfortable, so my kids begged to play outside. I scoured the closet for hats that fit. The kids stomped into boots and zipped suits from ankle to neck. We wrestled with mittens and fingers and thumbs until everything was covered and we were all sweating from the layers and the effort, tumbling outside just in time to escape the discomfort.

The snow was softening the world. It was taking the edges off our backyards and closing the distance between the neighbors we hadn’t seen since the first frost. It made it feel small, like Mother Nature had scooped up the streets and trees and homes and lawns into her arms, tucking them all into a pocket-sized scene. As we shoveled sidewalks and scraped windshields, we waved in camaraderie. We were all in it together. The snow forced a pause, a breath we hadn’t known we needed. In the muffled quiet of cascading snow, we didn’t need to say anything. We all felt the serene and special presence of something good and grace-filled.

The kids and I trudged through the unplowed drive to the mini-mountain in the front lawn. Our home is the final stop on a dead-end, so the street’s snow was delivered to our doorstep, a mound growing magically overnight. It was a gift of frozen opportunities, ready to mold and make into cavernous forts, bridges of white and frozen staircases to the top of our own little white-washed world.

The kids scurried across the lawn with wide grins and big possibilities. Knox, began to architect and excavate the foundations of a cave. Ellery, our eldest, began to smooth and sand the mountain with care, rounding out its corners and edges. Isla held tight to me, to wrestle and tumble and collapse on me in breathless laughter. Little Rosie wanted to smile and stumble in her overstuffed snowsuit, feeling the freedom in falling.

It wasn’t all idilic. Within seconds, an ‘accidental’ throw had landed a handful of snow in Isla’s face. On a couple of unfortunate occasions, a tree would twist in the wind, scattering snow in cold bursts on shocked, rosy cheeks. The soft air would be shattered with screams and cries. Repeatedly, little lips and noses and eyelashes were dusted and warmed. At first it just felt like work, each time yanking my gloves to melt the snow from their faces with the warmth of my hands.

But soon, I realized, they wouldn’t be asking for help. Soon, I wouldn’t be allowed to fit their faces in my palms and stare into their innocence and see their life spreading out ahead. Soon, they would fall down, get up and dust themselves off. Soon, they would be more careful to show me their scrapes or their frozen faces or their anxious souls. So I refused my instinct to tell them to dust it off. I stopped and treasured their flushed chins and cherry noses, and drew their faces close to mine and inhaled a moment of fragile, precarious clarity.

As I wrestled each one of them, my kids, my legacy, my heart, I paged through the future like a flip book. Some day, I will be scared or lost or cold. Life’s wicked winters will leave me stuck in waist deep powder and they will come to me. Soon, perhaps, I would be caught in my own storm, shocked at the icy blast of life, blinded by the whiteout. Soon, I would need their little hands to hold and lead me, to warm my weathered face. They will warm me, they will promise me that tomomorrw the snow will stop swirling and blinding and biting and will fall softly again. They will help me remember the days and the ways that we laughed together until we were drunk on joy and hot cocoa. They will spark these memories of a family knit closely together through moments in the snow.

I want this for us. I want us all to be pouncing and playing and parading around in life, independent and busy and passionate. But also instantly available, ready with warm hands to melt life’s disappointments, to warm the cold shoulder of rejection or failure, to bring the cozy comfort of family. I want us to journey together, lifting each other with laughter, pulling each other through pains, seeing into our souls in a way that only family can. I want this in the easy sun of summer and the windchill of winter.

Even now, before their minds can comprehend my worry or their brains can present the wisdom I may need, they bring me through blizzards, holding my hand by simply being. As they live and play, screaming with abandon and crying with delight, they draw me through the storms that will pass, their joy being a guide more than they could know. Even now, their limitless love is my mentor, their childlike faith and hope and forgiveness my guide.

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