Snow watch
It’s snowing outside, and I’m sitting in a coffee shop.
As a kid, I loved winter, and was obsessed with snow. I grew up in Germany, where there was occasional snow and Virginia, where there was a dusting every few years. I picked exotic places like North Dakota and Alaska for history reports, and I had a silly video program called “Snow Watch” I staged every Christmas with my old camera and an unused door across cement planks for a news desk. Snow was the thing to hope for; the thing that made everything different.
Weather of my childhood was plain and mild, with no real blips and the idea of living somewhere where CRAZY SHIT fell from the SKY thrilled me.
I’m going on my tenth winter in Minnesota, where it snows four months out of the year. I didn’t move here because of the snow; in fact, I don’t think Minnesota’s snow registered when I bought my plane ticket.
But here I am, land of snow. I just spent 25 minutes in the windy, sub-zero temperatures brushing off my car. I can never reach the roof, so my car is mohawked until the sun dries it up. I started my car, then ran back in the house, my boots soaked, my once-pink coat white and brown, and I wished for sun and heat. Sun watch!
I want to love winter like I used to. Of course I do. I loved the idea of snow, Christmas Eve (the morning was too anti-climactic), being pulled in a sled by my best friend’s father (now dead 17 years of pancreatic cancer), searching half-heartedly for gloves lost in a drift, drinking too much cheap vodka in a dorm room then playing hide-and-seek behind the theater.
(Those people I stumbled around with, they’re married off and their kids run around now, which is how it goes and I don’t care about nostalgia like I used to.)
But ————- Christmas morning, I made a list of my friends’ children. Just the names. We went from just each other, then we added on, and these add-ons have names, and I listed the names and connected them with lines to their parents. Left blank spaces for the kids to come. One next to my name! (This isn’t an announcement. It’s a what-if.)
I’d been looking at photos of one of the kids, a daughter, who looked so much like her father, that I felt uncomfortable. A clumsy spacewoman, unobserved.
On my first day in Minnesota, my mom and I ate in the top floor of a downtown hotel. The restaurant rotated, slowly. The snow was heavy because it was January and we were high above the equator. It was the Year 2000. Nothing exploded. I’d convinced myself we would will into being the meltdowns and explosions and apocalypse just by believing it would happen. I did not stockpile water or vitamins or whatever it is you stockpile in emergencies. I’d just bought a ticket to Minnesota and stepped on a plane and landed there. It was my 19th birthday, and my mom bought me a glass of white wine and we twirled in this crazy restaurant while the snow piled below us.
Imagine all those things to come! All the things I didn’t know about! Nothing special.
Snow watch! Breaking news! This is Zosia Blue reporting live. Willed into existence.
Posted by: Zosia | 01-07-2010 | 02:01 PM
Posted in: General | Comments (2)