It was the kind of snow Monday that was too much for even the biggest car brush, so he had to use a push broom to clear the windshield. His high boots sank into the drifts that had built up past the hubcaps, and snow got in his socks. It would be a huge burden to shovel the walk. Already, there had been talk on the morning shows of the bad luck: so much snow just when there was hope of winter being over. "No wonder people spend the season in Florida," someone had said, and someone else added: "What kind of masochists live in New England, anyway?"
And yet, even as he worked, he thought how beautiful it was, and how much he had missed it these past months. He is not even sure why, but somehow, a deep, new snow can feel as much like a time of renewal as spring itself. Perhaps it's that his life so far had always put him in cold places, like Chicago, where his favorite time was December, when they string Christmas lights on hundreds of trees along North Michigan Avenue. As with New York's Fifth Avenue, it's a far more vibrant time in the city than summer.
As a teen-ager, he would spend weekends on a family farm near the Mississippi River. He'd often get angry when they would go, because he was missing this party, or that one. But, after the three-hour drive, if it had snowed, even he noted how stunning the landscape was. He remembers still the beauty of a herd of red Angus cows walking through a field of white.
During winter break of his first college year, he and his brothers took a toboggan to one of the side fields, and to show his courage, he rode it down a long hill, over the edge of a ravine. He hit a tree, breaking several ribs. It meant there would be no skiing back at school in Vermont, or any athletic activity. That was against his nature, but in its own way, it was a gift.
The snows that winter of 1970-71 were among the deepest on record. He remembers it piled so high on the side of the roads that the trucks had to make two passes, first at ground level, and then setting their plows 4 feet high to push the top of the banks farther back.
Middlebury has a 4-1-4 program, with students taking a single course in January term. He took one in writing, so that's all he did that month. There were two professors, Mr. Hill and Mr. Price, and they assigned a daily essay, which was quite a challenge, but that's why it so profoundly shaped his skills, because it was hard.
He would sit in his dorm, looking out the window, and all month it was pure white. He thinks there was something about the cold and snow that helped his writing, surrounding him like a blank, crisp canvas and sharpening his mind. He often played the same records while writing, and one song in particular, "White Bird" by It's a Beautiful Day, always brings him back to that time.
His first job was in Utica, the heart of the snow belt in upstate New York. Though not known as a picturesque town, like all towns, it was pretty in white, and it was white much of winter. When he closes his eyes and thinks back, that's the season he always remembers there. He remembers, too, the girl he met who lived in Sweden around then. His visits to Stockholm, a city made to be dressed in snow, were always in winter. There was also the week the two of them spent skiing in Verbier, in Switzerland, but more than the skiing he can picture their walks through the Alpine village, and how they would stop for sundaes, called Coupe Denmarks, and eat them outside in the cold.
He was hired then by The Providence Journal, which stationed him in Newport, R.I., and everyone there told him the town was all about the summer. But his keenest memories are of deep snowfalls in his neighborhood, where he had a small apartment, and little money, and it was all he needed. He still can recall the blizzards that so immobilized transport that the next day, he could walk down the middle of almost every street, leaving deep footprints.
For many years now he has lived in Providence, where winters can be bleak. This one has seemed especially so, with only occasional snowfalls, followed by rains and then deep freezes that left walkways covered in black ice. The snowdrifts that remained were shrunken and dirty.
But unexpectedly, Monday brought what seemed the season's purest snowfall, closing schools and restarting the comments about the attractions of warmer places.
And yet, as he took out his dog early in the morning to make first tracks through the deep drifts in nearby city woods, with the shovel and broom still awaiting him, he felt this was as the season was meant to be.
(mpatinkin(at)projo.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Providence JournalColumn
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