18. Snow

Its colors, sounds & memories; its beauty, joys & danger

Part of the ongoing series on Beauty and Nature

Photo by Mihai Surdu on Unsplash

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

                                                                    -James Joyce, ending of The Dead (Dubliners, 1914)

This might be my favorite passage ever written in the English language. I also love the John Huston film; here’s a clip of the last lines being read aloud with shots of snow over Dublin. There’s something haunting in the passage, as if the ghosts are among the living and the living exist also among the dead. The snow unifies them in some other-worldly space, connecting them all and covering the harsh angles of opposition made between creatures. The ice crystals are like manifestations of the universe’s magical energy, constantly creating and destroying in cycles we are only minuscule parts of.

Snow.

What do you think of it?

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a snow lover. Not just for skiing, which I also love, but snow falling in the air and hopefully sticking to the ground. When I see it on a weather speculation, I get excited. When I see the first flakes falling or wake up to white rooftops, I am transported to another world. I stop whatever I’m doing and stare.

I’m one of those strange creatures who gets giddy at the sight of snow – even a few flakes in the sky will lift me to another plane of existence. My mother, who lives in harsh-winter-prone Boston where many other retirees are so fed up that they go to the extreme of leaving for the entire winter, says she prefers if I’m home when it snows because she’s reminded that it’s not just a pain in the butt. Even when I’m not home, she’ll send me photographs of the snow to demonstrate its beauty, activate memories, and help her feel less depressed about it, or at least less cold.

Admittedly, if you live in the urban areas in and around Boston, which I did for a few years, it’s a massive nuisance trying to dig your car out or find a spot to put your car that won’t cost a million bucks when there’s a winter storm parking ban. Even the metro gets stuck. So, if you’re someone who has to get somewhere for work, the morning of digging out and finding a way to get there if the plows haven’t reached you yet, can be a nightmare.

As a teacher, though, I was lucky that anything too crazy was likely to result in a snow day; a day off from school just like when we were kids. I’ve heard post-pandemic snow days are spent largely online with virtual learning. A little bit of that’s good and maybe keeps schools from having to continue late into the summer when they’ve had an especially brutal winter. I mean, I get it. I was a high school teacher near Boston for a few years and as much as I loved a surprise day off, doing another week into the summer was less than ideal, especially if your classroom was next to the tar-topped roofs like mine was. There are a lot of benefits to online teaching on these days, but I’m inclined to think the benefits of a true snow day outweigh the cons. I can think of some good hybrid options, but I’m not here with my educator hat on; I’m thinking more about life (so I guess education, too, but in a different way).

There’s something lost in not allowing the magic of the snow to stop everyone in their tracks. To play. To pause. To look. To hibernate — if just for one special day.

Vermont winter woods, Photo by Daniel Norris on Unsplash

I used to think my joy at these cold, white crystals of ice must be a nostalgic sort of feeling for childhood or perhaps for home, especially when I lived in subtropical Hong Kong. It’s true that there’s something unique and even literary about the idea of a New England winter. It’s been written into books and films and captured in paintings and photographs over the years. New England’s four seasons are in such extremes that we tend to feel them as part of our souls. The metaphors of life cycles and metamorphoses associated with seasons is second nature to us.

Or is it Christmas, and the nostalgia that specifically comes with this holiday, a rare time when - even if not Christian - American families usually have time off together? The desire for a ‘white Christmas’, all the films with snowstorms coinciding with the magic of Christmas?

A snow day or a snowy winter holiday was the perfect manifestation of the idea of snow: stop what you’re doing. Pause. Look at the beauty. Go slow. Play. Cook something or make a fire. Read a book. Throw on your warm gear and take a walk – feel it under your feet. Soft and powdery or crunchy and heavy. Perhaps a slippery dusting, half skating down the street. Or, in large accumulations, following footprints of the early dog walker to save yourself from getting a boot stuck and ice crystals falling down toward your toes.

Like a welcome mask to the darkness…to our own problems. In snow, I feel solitude instead of loneliness. I feel a part of nature, even if witnessing the snowfall only from inside. It changes our perspective of the day and shakes up our realities.

Tomorrow is the first day of winter in the northern hemisphere, but it was mid-September, still summer, when Switzerland’s first stuck snowfall in the mountains popped up on my Instagram feed. Since then, we’ve had light snow in Basel that made me pause everything, like it always does.

Literary winters

To start getting into the texts today, I’ll do something a little different. I’ll start us out with a few short excerpts related to snow without comment before discussing related topics. Please feel free to make comments yourselves or simply sit with the passages one day, either imagining the scenes or gazing out at snow from your own window. We would also love to hear your favorite snow passages from literature in the comments.

Well, one sunny morning
After a downy storm, he passed our place
And found me banking up the house with snow.
And I was burrowing in deep for warmth,
Piling it well above the window-sills.
The snow against the window caught his eye.
‘Hey, that’s a pretty thought’—those were his words.
‘So you can think it’s six feet deep outside,
While you sit warm and read up balanced rations.
You can’t get too much winter in the winter.’

                              -excerpt from Robert Frost's "Snow"

Evenings in the village were very quiet, just the barking of a mongrel dog or two. Everyone was at home having dinner, and there were lights in every window. As usual, it snowed. The roofs had heavy overhangs of snow, the paths tramped into the snow during the day went white again, and the hard-packed banks on either side grew higher and higher. Inside the snow banks were deep, narrow tunnels where the children had dug hideouts for themselves during thaws. And outside stood their snowmen, snowhorses, formless shapes with teeth and eyes of bits of tin and coal. When the next hard freeze came, they poured water over these sculptures so they'd harden to ice.
   One day Katri paused before one of these images and saw that it was a likeness to herself. 

    -The True Deceiver, Tove Jansson (p. 27, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal)

The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus-driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called what he felt inside him 'the silence of snow'.
[...]
As he watched the snow outside the window fall as slowly and silently as the snow in his dream, the traveller fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world. Soon afterwards, he did something else that he had not done for years and fell asleep in his seat.

               -Snow, Orhan Pamuk (pp. 3-4, translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely)

The village lay under two feet of snow, with drifts at the windy corners. In a sky of iron the points of the Dipper hung like icicles and Orion flashed his cold fires. The moon had set, but the night was so transparent that the white house-fronts between the elms looked gray against the snow, clumps of bushes made black stains on it, and the basement windows of the church sent shafts of yellow light far across the endless undulations.
[...]
As he strode along through the snow the sense of such meanings glowed in his brain and mingled with the bodily flush produced by his sharp tramp. At the end of the village he paused before the darkened front of the church. He stood there a moment, breathing quickly, and looking up and down the street, in which not another figure moved. The pitch of the Corbury road, below lawyer Varnum's spruces, was the favourite coasting-ground of Starkfield, and on clear evenings the church corner rang till late with the shouts of the coasters; but to-night not a sled darkened the whiteness of the long declivity. The hush of midnight lay on the village, and all its waking life was gathered behind the church windows, from which strains of dance-music flowed with the broad bands of yellow light.

                      -Ethan Frome, Edith Wharton (Chapter 1)

The western windows of Olive's drawing-room, looking over the water, took in the red sunsets of winter; the long, low bridge that crawled, on its staggering posts, across the Charles; the casual patches of ice and snow; the desolate suburban horizons, peeled and made bald by the rigour of the season; the general hard, cold void of the prospect; the extrusion, at Charlestown, at Cambridge, of a few chimneys and steeples, straight, sordid tubes of factories and engine-shops, or spare, heavenward finger of the New England meeting-house. There was something inexorable in the poverty of the scene, shameful in the meanness of its details, which gave a collective impression of boards and tin and frozen earth, sheds and rotting piles, railway-lines striding flat across a thoroughfare of puddles, and tracks of the humbler, the universal horse-car, traversing obliquely this path of danger; loose fences, vacant lots, mounds of refuse, yards bestrewn with iron pipes, telegraph poles, and bare wooden backs of places. Verena thought such a view lovely, and she was by no means without excuse when, as the afternoon closed, the ugly picture was tinted with a clear, cold rosiness. The air, in its windless chill, seemed to tinkle like a crystal, the faintest gradations of tone were perceptible in the sky, the west became deep and delicate, everything grew doubly distinct before taking on the dimness of evening. There were pink flushes on snow, "tender" reflexions in patches of stiffened marsh, sounds of car-bells, no longer vulgar, but almost silvery, on the long bridge, lonely outlines of distant dusky undulations against the fading glow. These agreeable effects used to light up that end of the drawing-room, and Olive often sat at the window with her companion before it was time for the lamp. They admired the sunsets, they rejoiced in the ruddy spots projected upon the parlour-wall, they followed the darkening perspective in fanciful excursions. They watched the stellar points come out at last in a colder heaven, and then, shuddering a little, arm in arm, they turned away, with a sense that the winter night was even more cruel than the tyranny of men—turned back to drawn curtains and a brighter fire and a glittering tea-tray and more and more talk about the long martyrdom of women, a subject as to which Olive was inexhaustible and really most interesting. There were some nights of deep snowfall, when Charles Street was white and muffled and the door-bell foredoomed to silence, which seemed little islands of lamp-light, of enlarged and intensified vision. They read a great deal of history together, and read it ever with the same thought—that of finding confirmation in it for this idea that their sex had suffered inexpressibly, and that at any moment in the course of human affairs the state of the world would have been so much less horrible (history seemed to them in every way horrible) if women had been able to press down the scale. 

                                        -The Bostonians, Henry James (Chapter 10)

The blue lake and snow-clad mountains—they never change; and I think our placid home and our contented hearts are regulated by the same immutable laws.  

                              -Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (Chapter 6)

He wants real winter where woods are sheathed in snow, trees emphatic with its white, their bareness shining and enhanced because of it, the ground underfoot snow-covered as if with frozen feathers or shredded cloud but streaked with gold through the trees from low winter sun, and at the end of the barely discernible track, along the dip in the snow that indicates a muffled path between the trees, the view and the woods opening to a light that’s itself untrodden, never been blemished, wide like an expanse of snow-sea, above it more snow promised, waiting its time in the blank of the sky.

                                                          -Winter, Ali Smith

In Schrunz, on Christmas day, the snow was so bright it hurt your eyes when you looked out from the Weinstube and saw every one coming home from church. That was where they walked up the sleigh-smoothed urine-yellowed road along the river with the steep pine hills, skis heavy on the shoulder, and where they ran down the glacier above the Madlenerhaus, the snow as smooth to see as cake frosting and as light as powder and he remembered the noiseless rush the speed made as you dropped down like a bird.

               -"The Snows of Kilimanjaro," Ernest Hemingway

Colors of snow

“Snow is white because it reflects all the colors of light.” Simple physics will tell us this, but it’s still hard to believe when the whiteness reminds us more of death and absence.

However, viewing these colors in refraction is possible. We experience it all the time. Many of us have witnessed the 22-degree halo around the moon before snow even falls; the ice crystals in the sky form a circular rainbow. This article by Michael Vollmer and Joseph A Shaw demonstrates and explains this effect in detail, including diagrams of the light rays.

We see the vibrant colors of snow in many paintings of winter. Rarely is a scene just white. Instead the light and shadows play with color, or at least shades of white.

Claude Monet’s impressionist paintings of snow are some of the most beautiful. He painted over a hundred snow scenes, often adding vibrancy through a range of colors, as in the scene below:

thehughlane

A post shared by Hugh Lane Gallery (@thehughlane)

[I looked at both Frost (quoted above) and Monet in the Autumn post back in September. They are two of my favorites. I also find it helpful to understand this concept of changing seasons and what it means from the perspective of a few specific artists (Ali Smith and Eric Rohmer as well).]

The image from another impressionist painting at Boston’s MFA by Childe Hassam, At Dusk (Boston Common at Twilight), 1885-1886, has contrastingly warm tones to the blues Monet uses in many of his snow paintings. Although the colors are mainly in the sky and street, the lights seem to reflect off of Boston Common whose blankness is of more interest than the busy world around the pedestrians. Here are a few other winter paintings put together by NPR.

Some see the coming of snow as a kind of light in the winter. I recall attending a conference in Copenhagen in early December. The Swedes were delighting at news of heavy snowfall back home for this reason. They told a confused professor from Seattle that when the snow comes, then it is bright again. It carries them through the winter with reflections of the moon, for the sun only comes briefly while they are at work.

There are places where snow and darkness make people happy. A few years ago, Atlantic writer Kari Leibowitz explored this first hand for a year in a small town in Norway called Tromsø, where there is no sun from November to January. The article — “The Norwegian Town Where the Sun Doesn’t Rise” — does not dismiss seasonal affect disorder (and addresses this in the article) but also expresses a hypothesis of how the people have been able to change their attitude and framework to welcome the winter darkness. With linked research, Leibowitz writes: “Residents of northern Norway seem able to avoid much of the wintertime suffering experienced elsewhere—including, paradoxically, in warmer, brighter, more southern locations.”

And why? Is it simply a change of mindset? Some locals tell Leibowitz that winter, despite its full darkness, is their favorite time of year, while she has been trying to prepare herself for its cruelty and last long enough to make it until summer. Some of her observations follow:

In Tromsø, the prevailing sentiment is that winter is something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured. According to my friends, winter in Tromsø would be full of snow, skiing, the northern lights, and all things koselig, the Norwegian word for cozy. By November, open-flame candles would adorn every café, restaurant, home, and even workspace. Over the following months I learned firsthand that, far from a period of absolute darkness, the Polar Night in Tromsø is a time of beautiful colors and soft, indirect light. Even during the darkest times, there are still two or three hours of light a day as the sun skirts just below the horizon, never fully rising. During the longer “days” of the Polar Night, in November and January, the skies can be filled with up to six hours of sunrise- and sunset-like colors.

The many colors of snow! The joy of doing things in the snow! Enjoying winter’s coziness! For many of us, this reflection may feel like a nostalgia for childhood…before winter just becomes a pain in the butt.

For that reason, I also enjoy reading snowy tales for children to my son. One of my all time favorites is Ezra Jack Keats’ Snowy Day:

ejkfoundation

A post shared by Ezra Jack Keats Foundation (@ejkfoundation)

You can also see the many colors of snow even in the image here - purples, pinks, even green. The post above also reveals that on the 125th anniversary of New York Public Library, Keats’ book was the #1 checkout of all time. Here you can see and hear Questlove and Grace Harry reading it. The book follows a boy in the city on a snow journey. He learns a lot in his exploration and - in the bathtub - “thought and thought and thought about them.” This young philosopher experiences joy, exclusion, wonder, and sadness; then the next day, he is overjoyed to find the snow out his window again, and goes off to explore with his neighbor.

When I taught primary/elementary school art for a year, we used this book’s beautiful images as a muse to our potato stamp designs of winter scenes. It’s not just color that Keats explores in his designs; it’s also the shapes of snow. The footprints and marks of sticks or other implements, the snow angels (imagined bas relief) and snowmen (first sculptures), the flakes on windows, the funny outlines of winter hats, the snow that hangs in strange ways to trees and buildings.

The rarity of snow & first encounters

Does rarity make something better or more desirable? Not in every case, of course. I wouldn’t get excited about an earthquake or volcanic eruption. But other rarity in nature can also be awe-inspiring. Although snow comes rather frequently to New York City, the kind of snow that stops traffic and cancels school is still rare. Both the snow itself and the stopping of other activities allows for this discovery through nature in the middle of the city.

In many places, snow is not rare at all. In fact, many in these climates are sick of snow by springtime, even if they enjoy its beauty or recreational uses. At college in Maine, we sometimes had to shovel off the track for an April competition. As much as I love snow, we were all ready for different weather.

In that same space, one of my teammates came from California and had never seen snow until her first winter in Maine. Well, the snow came in October, so technically it was still fall. She was shocked by it, staring for ages like a young child at it falling from the sky, trying to eat it on her tongue.

My son was born in Austria, where there is plenty of snow. After his birth, he and I were in the hospital a week. Though only mid-November, it started snowing out our window on and off, accumulating on the garden and rooftops outside. It both reminded me of home and gave me peace, especially when the pain and fatigue where really bad. Perhaps it was the feeling of hibernation that I liked or just looking at the beauty. It somehow connected me — I don’t mean to one particular thing but to the world in general, as if I were in danger of floating away. It’s not far from the Joyce quote at the top of this newsletter. It was is if the snow packed me into the cycle of life; birth reminds us also of mortality, of death. And it connected me to nature, to home, and back into myself…reminding me that things were not just happening to me in some abstract reality but that this was my life, changing greatly perhaps, but still me.

My son experienced some snow a few times in the city, in Vienna, but finally had real dumpings of it in Switzerland. In Basel, we are also in a valley and don’t often see accumulation, but we took a trip to Rigi mountain in the winter to enjoy some old mountain trains, toboggans, and views of the Alps.

When we reached a large area of untouched powder, he entered. It was as if he had never seen it before. Or had never had a chance to fully immerse himself in it. He began rolling in it, eating it, throwing it up in the air, laughing like a dolphin all the while. He was making such a scene that some tourists came over to photograph him. At first, this felt a little odd, but I realized that his joy was something that perhaps these tourists also somehow felt through his experience. It was as if they were photographing in place of actually rolling in the snow themselves.

Buzz in the snow on Rigi mountain, February 2022 (author’s photo)

And why not? Why not roll around in the snow sometimes, just for the heck of it? What are your memories of snow as a kid or how do your kids interact with the ice crystals?

When I lived in Hong Kong, I used to ensure some snow every winter, either back home in Boston or by traveling to Japan for some skiing. But the last winter before I left, there was a rare snowfall during a polar vortex. One of the mountains ‘officially’ reported snow and ice, causing snow tourists to arrive and become trapped. Emergency vehicles were also not prepared for these conditions (if you’ve ever been on black ice, it was like this; almost impossible unless you have salt and sand to break it up).

But even on the mid-level pathway called Bowen Road where I often ran, I was able to see snow that morning. It didn’t stick; the ground was too warm, so this was a much safer place to view it.

In researching a few pieces of backup for my memory of this experience, I also came across a strange encounter of snow in San Juan, Puerto Rico. In The New Yorker podcast, we learn that a 1950s mayor, Felisa Rincón de Gautier, who had lived in New York, brought snow by plane to the city for several years.

The rarity makes the snow more special – but it happened for four years in a row in the 1950s …some now older adults described it as: ”magnificent, magnificent! Maybe there was a subliminal message there that I’m beginning to understand in the end of my life!” These people seemed to remember whole days of snow playing and snowball fights. Others hated it, remembering “ten minutes” of playing followed by quick mud and disgust. They see it as symbols of colonial oppression, as people trying to bring America and its betterness to a place that was fine on its own (without snow).

The mayor of San Juan wanted to bring snow to Puerto Rico because she remembered feeling joy as a child in New York. She claims to have simply wanted to share that joy with her city’s denizens. But many saw not just the snow itself, but the absurdity of it as a function of the broken government and colonial status.

The podcast likens the experience to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ 100 Years of Solitude (1967), discussing the fictional “ice” he brings to the Caribbean as a symbol of “dark magic, something existing where it doesn’t belong.” The surrealism of the tale is in part a look at the fate of Latin America as something of the absurd.

Poor snow gets caught up in tragic fate again in Mark Fergus’ thriller First Snow (2006), starring Guy Pearce. The trailer itself mentions “fate” or “destiny” almost a hundred times. I guess the way snow seems to magically change things in an instant (or overnight) makes it apt to deal with either absurdity or ominous predictions.

The sounds of snow

Snow makes a sound, too…when we walk on it, as it falls from rooftops…even the falling of every flake does something to sound: it stops it or seems to capture the normal vibrations of our world. I think of quiet when I think of a snow-covered morning.

But snow and ice also have unique sounds of their own that can be captured with technology and made into something musical. DJ Spooky is an experimental hip hop musician and multimedia artist with a wide array of experimental work. I first encountered him as an undergraduate when he came back to his alma mater to do a show; basically a party. I didn’t know he was also an activist.

The next time I saw him was at the University of Hong Kong, where he shared his work “Arctic Rhythms” and explained its connection to climate change activism. The sounds are surreal and haunting, beautiful and strange. The best thing to do is just watch the videos below where DJ Spooky also explains the “vocabulary” of his digital media.

Late addition - just finished The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller. Excellent, excellent novel about a disfigured miner who lives in the Arctic Circle a hundred years ago.

nathanielianmiller

A post shared by Nathaniel Ian Miller (@nathanielianmiller)

Avalanche: snow’s extreme dangers

In case you were wondering, the sound of an avalanche is absolutely terrifying in person. Several times, whilst skiing or winter hiking in France and Switzerland, I have witnessed these dangerous and sudden falls of snow. You hear it first. Like an explosion. You stop whatever you’re doing and look around, heart racing, wondering if you’ll have the energy and courage to act should the snow be falling toward you. You know (in my case at least) you’re on a protected and monitored trail, but you also know it’s still possible, people have died on these trails before.

Finally spotting the cloud of white across on a different peak is a relief and a unique experience. The sun, vibrations, or weight can trigger an avalanche. National Geographic explains it as such:

A snow avalanche begins when an unstable mass of snow breaks away from a slope. The snow picks up speed as it moves downhill, producing a river of snow and a cloud of icy particles that rises high into the air. The moving mass picks up even more snow as it rushes downhill. A large, fully developed avalanche can weigh as much as a million tons. It can travel faster than 320 kilometers per hour (200 miles per hour).

Avalanches occur as layers in a snowpack slide off. A snowpack is simply layers of snow that build up in an area, such as the side of a mountain. In winter, repeated snowfalls build a snowpack dozens of meters thick. The layers vary in thickness and texture.

“Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” was a multimedia story from the NYT that captured a tragedy. The interactive nature of John Branch’s multimedia article was the first of its kind. Journalists refer to it as a game changer in reporting. The multi-sensory experience to examine the truth was in some ways a merging of art and fact. The exploratory nature of the ‘article’, which is in reality made of many articles, interviews, videos, maps, and photographs, allows the reader make discoveries for themselves in the in-between; essentially it asks us to create our own intertexts to find meaning.

Ruben Östlund’s Force Majeure (2014) is a dark comedy about a Swedish family who survives an avalanche. The premise is that the father of the family runs when the avalanche comes, without attempting to help his children or wife. While there are humorous moments simply about multi-family ski vacations, much of the subtle exchanges have to do with the wife questioning the her husband’s love, support, and even masculinity. It also brings up questions about mortality and what we would do when faced with extreme danger. We may hope to act one way while instead the reality is that our instincts may kick in.

The beauty of The Snowman

I’m not doing a post about Christmas texts (this year, at least), but I’ve got to include one that some would consider a Christmas movie (although the tree and later Santa visit seem to be secondary to the story in my opinion). Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman (1978) is a classic picture book and film adaptation that explores a child’s encounter with snow through his imagination in the English countryside.

With David Bowie’s cameo in the 1982 adaptation as the grown up ‘boy’, the piano music mimicking changing moods, the choir boy song (that we sing in our apartment all year long — “We’re walking in the air!”), the beautifully simple colored pencil drawings…what’s not to love?

These words were added to the adaptation for Bowie: “The snow fell steadily all through the night. The room was filled with light and silence, and I knew then it was to be a magical day.”

[Spoiler alert] My son cries every time at the end when the snowman melts, and maybe I do a little, too. It was his first encounter with the idea of death.

The death here is not unlike the one that Joyce depicts and the sadness is similar to Keats’ young protagonist’s as his snowball melts. As the snowman melts, it becomes a part of the farmland around the boy’s house, where he will continue to play through different seasons. We are reminded of time passing and the boy’s mortality when we see the grown up he has become. Since both Bowie and Briggs (just this year) have sadly died, we are also reminded even more of this life end. But at the same time, the natural landscape and the magic of nature continue beyond the text.

Although many view snow or winter as a metaphor for death, the temporary halting of life, I often see the melting of snow as a death. As the end to some magical beauty we’ve all experienced. Now, perhaps a rebirth of spring takes place. But I often grieve those cold, alert winter days where snow’s presence makes me feel both at peace and question everything I take for granted around me. I find renewed gratitude for the ways of nature and the unexpected moments in our lives.

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Dr. Kathleen Waller writes novels and researches culture through the arts. She currently writes this newsletter and is working on a Vienna-based thriller. You can connect with her on Instagram or Twitter where she’s sure to document her love affair with snow in Switzerland this winter.