hoofprints on snow angels
I’ve never seen snow back home like we did on this trip. Mom had sent me photos of the pines and the old oak tree between the house and the lake when the snow had just fallen, a quiet blue settled over everything. There had been no wind and the snow piled up on even the smallest of twigs. We didn’t arrive until days later and I expected it all to be gone by then - blown away or melted, disturbed in some way. It was close to midnight when we drove down the driveway but I could see in the bright white of the headlights that the trees lining the driveway were covered in more snow than I had ever known them to be.
The next morning, waking up jet-lagged ahead of any sign of sunrise, I could see billowing, curved amorphous shapes rising out of the ground. The rising sun changed them from dark, hazy blobs to gentle puffs of pink, coral, then gold. The trees on the opposite shore of the lake were the first to catch the light, then the rays spread towards us, turning the lake from blue to gold to bright white. The tip of the old white pine, down on the shore to the south of where the dock goes in summer, was the first to catch the light on our side and flecks of gold filtered from the tip to the ground whenever squirrels jumped from branch to branch. The snow looked like the kind of light, open snow that I’d expect the slightest breeze to knock off. But it had fallen wet and had frozen to the pine boughs so that they drooped, sometimes breaking with their weight, and we were left with a surreal snowscape that lasted, defying its tendency to fall.
The first few days, still jet-lagged, I woke early and, drinking coffee, sat and watched the first light touch the opposite shore then begin its sweep towards us as it climbed higher. Like a folded fan opening, it arched across the snow-covered surface of the lake. A few days in, the wind picked up on a flat, grey day - the snow on the branches mostly hung on, but the snow on the lake drifted. I couldn’t see to what extent until the next morning, when the light caught the dunes and they formed deep blue snow shadows against ribbons of white.
The wind was still howling from the north, and the dunes changed as I watched them, not only in shape and size but also in tone as the sun rose higher. I wanted to see them closer as they moved across the lake so I put on all of my layers over my pajamas to venture out at -30C. The particles of snow blew over the lake’s surface so that the boundary between air and ground was fluid. The snow scattered and sounded like what I imagined a sand storm on a windscreen would.
I walked back out to see the drifts again later. I followed my footprints across the yard beneath the bird feeders, then dropped down to the lake’s surface. I followed them past the snow angels in the bay and the hoof prints of the deer that had walked along the edge, through one of the angel’s wings. I followed my tracks for about 20 meters and then they disappeared. Though not entirely - they had been filled in but the snow differed within them - barely perceptible in the same way faint stars are. I lost sight of them when I looked directly for too long and they existed as little more than a vague sense of something having passed that way earlier.
Walking back to the house, the wind caught the upper branches of a white pine and the snow blew off in a tornado of glitter.
Watching the cold from inside was very different. The snow shadows, the light, the glint of snow in the air. Warm from the fireplace, sunlight stronger than I’m used to, streaming in through the windows; we closed the blinds at nightfall to keep the day’s energy in. In the mornings I’d open the blinds and sit on the floor to watch the bird feeders at eye level from the upstairs living room. Round bodies of juncos, the caws of blue jays, the different reds of woodpeckers’ heads, female cardinals’ beaks and male cardinals’ chests. Where the snow stayed on the branches, which was in most places, the birds perched, and ate their fill from the feeders. I watched them come in from wherever they hunkered down while the waning moon rose in the eastern sky. Squirrels ate what the birds dropped and then perched in tight balls on the little knobs of branches that had broken off; they tucked in against the trunk of the old oak as snow landed on their backs turning black to grey.
The same snow that filled in my boot prints on the lake squeaked under them on the plowed road and sounded empty when I kicked a snow-plow-created clump of it across the road’s dead end. Seventeen inches, some of it already blown away, sat perched on the railing of the deck and on the top of the picnic table.
Days later, when the moon was on its way to full, the weather changed. Icicles that had framed our views of drifts and billows of snow, of chickadees and jays at the feeders began to melt. They dripped, becoming thinner and thinner until they hung by a thread, gossamer trailing from the gutters.
Leaving for the airport, the snow was squelchy, sloppy. The edge of the highway had taken on that brown slushy quality that makes you long for more cold and snow again to make it clean. We drove past harvested corn fields which had been planted perpendicularly to the road. The stubs of the last crop poked through the snow in straight lines that tapered back into the distance as we drove past, each row flicking past like one of those old small picture flip books where you bend the pages to make them flip past as quickly as you can. The same shape and feeling of perspective was mirrored at the airport as I looked out from my window seat and we turned from taxiway onto the runway, lights lining it, tapering back, merging in the far distance.
