A Walker in the Suburbs

The snow could be deeper and more intense than any we’ve had this season, the forecasters said. Prepare for another winter storm.

But that was Sunday. The weather gurus have backed off now. The snow will mostly fall south of us, they say. At most we’ll get a glancing blow, a dusting to an inch.

I accept this new forecast, but I can’t ignore the stripes in the road, evidence of the slurry used for pre-treatment in these parts. Will they be necessary? Probably not. But it’s good to know they’re here.

Here’s our latest snow in real time, a white world I want to stare at all day. It won’t last long. Temperatures will rise, rain will fall. Knowing this snow won’t last for weeks makes it more precious. I’m winter-weary, yes, but not so soured on the season that I can’t be revived.

It must be the Catholic school kid in me, but I like to feel I “deserve” each season when it comes, that I’ve fully experienced the season that’s come before. This year, there will be no problem enjoying every speck of spring, because we’ve certainly endured the brunt of winter.

This is a heavy snow; shrubs and trees are coated. The only creatures stirring are the birds at our feeder. Fox and squirrels have yet to make tracks. All the better to enjoy the tableaux, the pristine expanse, the snow in real time.

Today we say farewell to January — and the snowpack. Even though we’ve had daytime temperatures in the 50s, the nights have been cold enough and the snow deep enough that at my house we’ve had some form of white stuff on the ground since January 5th.

But now the rain has moved in and the yard is a mottled mess, saturated soil with snow stripes like cirrus clouds. Somehow, though, the section where the snow was deepest still shows faint sled tracks from when the kiddos were here.

We mark the landscape in ways we cannot fathom, not just in the practices that give us firestorms and mudslides and summer nights without fireflies. But also with subtle signatures: the breaking of a twig and the harrowing of a track. This truth is more obvious when snow is on the ground. In that sense, snow keeps us honest. I’ll be sad to see it go.

For most of January I’ve been able to look out my office window and see a simplified, clarified world. Black and white. Horizontal and vertical. Stripped-down and still.

The only touches of color I see are the dark green of the bamboo fronds that grow up to my second-story window and the dusky red of the brick-front houses across the way.

“Take winter as you find him and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him,” wrote James Russell Lowell. “And tolerating none in you, which is a great comfort in the long run.”

I don’t like cold weather, but I haven’t minded our recent spate of it. I’m reminded of the way I felt when I lived through winters in more northern climes, which was strengthened and turned inward, more attuned to the essentials of life.

Here in the mid-Atlantic snow usually falls and melts within days. This year we have the frigid temperatures to keep white stuff on the ground a little longer. Long enough for reinforcements to arrive, in other words.

Last night we received a fresh coat of snow. Once again, tree branches are outlined in white, ghostly arms reaching toward the sky. Once again, holly leaves hang heavy with their burden.

Once again, there is shoveling to do (though I’ve largely escaped the duty this year), paths to carve, steps to sweep.

Once again our wan gray world is made new again, if only for a few hours.