A Walker in the Suburbs

We will have highs of 40 degrees or more the next few days, a welcome respite to the Arctic chill that’s plagued us for a month. But what we won’t have — soon — is sculptural snow.

I’ve grown accustomed to parking lot art displays and corner exhibitions, to strolls that are more like gallery walks than typical rambles.

Yes, there are advantages to warmer temperatures. Soon, perhaps, we’ll be able to park both cars side by side in the driveway.

But before this happens, the snowcrete will weaken and turn to mush. The chiseled snowbanks and statuesque berms will vanish before our eyes. Soon, we’ll be back where we started, strangely, still in drought conditions.

Normal life will be easier. I won’t lie. But there’s a part of me that will miss these bizarre, frigid, sculptural days.

Snowmageddon, Snowzilla and now … snowcrete. The differences in capitalization are intentional. Snowmageddon and Snowzilla were snowstorms, but snowcrete is the oh-so-clever name given to the stuff we’ve been shoveling for more than a week.

It’s a new word, as far as I know, and it perfectly expresses the combination of snow and concrete that last week’s storm left behind. Ask anyone who’s been shoveling it. Their arms, shoulders and back testify to the fact that this is no ordinary substance. It is, or ought to be, an entirely new element.

In the last few days I’ve gotten out more and seen first-hand the devastation this stuff has wrought. A parking lot piled high with snow boulders. Two-lane roads turned into one-lane roads. Bobcats brought in to “shovel” a driveway.

Is it snow? Ice? Sleet? None of the above. It’s snowcrete.

The snow is no longer a rumor; it’s a reality. It’s also buried under the sleet that fell on top of it, pelting it, falling and falling and falling some more. A day’s worth of sleet atop a night’s worth of snow.

Here from my office window I see a world that is cold and white. Not as cold as it will be tomorrow, when we’ll wake up to 3 degrees or some other single digit. Or even as cold as will be later today, when the winds pick up. But cold enough to keep the world white for the next week.

I want to enjoy it, but this is a snow to be endured. Crispy, crusty, and without the softening that winter precipitation can sometimes give a hard, cold landscape.

It’s 14 degrees as I write this post. The furnace is struggling. It’s gonna be another caffeinated day (see post below). But I’m thinking not of the blue sky and the bright sunshine that accompany these frigid temps. I’m thinking about snow and the rumors of snow.

A couple nights ago, someone I had just met casually mentioned “and then there’s the weekend.”

“What about the weekend?” I asked. In the D.C. metro area you never know what might be happening.

“The snowstorm,” she said, and then showed me the weather app on her phone, which displayed a snow icon for Sunday with “18 to 20 inches” beside it.

“Don’t cancel your plans yet,” noted the Capital Weather Gang, my go-to meteorological source. Check us out on Thursday. We’ll know more then.

I will. Until then. I’ll imagine snow and rumors of snow.

(A wan world awaits. From a November 2019 trip to Shenandoah National Park.)

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.