Snow Day
Year-end edition
In keeping with the end of a truly horrible year, I’ve committed to spending the next few weeks reveling in small discoveries of joy.
All my life I have spent in the pursuit of snow.
Other things too, of course. But the most enduring, the most sincere, the most pure desires of mine have been conjured from the glittering white stuff of fairytales and miracles. To me, the shift in the skies, the soft whirl of snow fluff, all seem to contain guarantees of happiness, of wonder. Promises of the new.
Still, for a long time, my only impressions of snow were but impressions of impressions - cinema, books, paintings. Singapore sits just off the equator, and if it snows here, the end days are afoot. As a child, I first came across snow as depicted in stories and encyclopedias, or glittering in gift-shop snowglobes, and then as a teenager, spending sweaty Christmases caroling in malls about this or that white Christmas. By the time I was in my twenties, the allure of stubbornly sipping mugs of hot chocolate each December, despite Singapore’s unabating humidity, began to wear off; it became clear that I, in fact, was the perennial chestnut roasting on an open fire. I gave up the habits but not the dream.
My friends who had lived abroad handled my obsessions with amusement. It’s very dirty, one of them said, footprints track all over it and then it gets muddy and filthy, it’s not at all like in your storybooks. Also, it’s cold. The kind of cold that gets in your bones, it’s horrible. I was undeterred. By my mid-twenties, I had become acquainted with tourist snow, visited upon our heads like fairy dust as we holidayed specifically in winter countries, transforming us into characters in the faraway tales of our childhood. Although my friends insisted tourist snow wasn’t the same as actually living with the stuff, I was convinced: snow was wonderful. It seemed incredible to me that frost could catch and turn as it fell, a perfectly formed crystal already melting on your palm. My infatuation deepened.
Even living in New York for a year didn’t wean me off my love for snow. My friends and I texted back and forth: it’s not snowing here yet. What about where you are? Oh, I’m jealous. The minute it comes, I’ll let you know. Last winter, the first real snowfall happened while I was in a gym class, after a week of the weather reports promising snow that perpetually failed to show. I had a large rubber ball beneath my thighs, I was trying to balance on my toes. Snow, someone gasped, and I turned to the window. The ball bounced away from me, the class was lost.
I lived around the corner from the neighborhood gym, so I rarely bothered with a coat, opting instead to jog over in my gym gear, to the amusement of the bodega uncle who often shouted at me to put a jacket on. That day, too, I stood sleeveless and sweaty at the crosswalk outside my gym, face tilted up as the snow accumulated on the ground around me. Crazy Chinese girl, the bodega uncle said, but he was laughing. You’re going to get sick! The baker from across the street came out to throw salt on the ground; she shouted at me to come inside. It’ll snow again tomorrow, go get your coat. No, I said, this is what I’ve been waiting for. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted. Life is cyclical, it repeats, the joy comes from learning to delight and not tire of it. No matter how many snow days lie in my future, this one is fresh, this one is new, this one is mine. I’m not missing a moment of it.
The baker was right: it did snow again the next day. But I was right too. I reveled not only in the fact that it was snowing now, but also that it was snowing again, the heady mixture of repetition and novelty sustaining a dreamy state of giddy joy. Again and again, that winter, snow would come, inconsistently, each turn in the air baiting me with anticipation, distracting me with delight.
Time spluttered after that, and now it’s been a year. Of all the losses we’ve had, the thing that surprised me the most was grieving the absence of snow. It was so trivial compared to everything else the year had taken, but I had subconsciously held the promise of winter in my heart, and watching the photographs of first snow bloom across social media, it all seemed to exist in a world that had closed itself off to me, far away. Then my phone pinged. It was a video from a friend in Germany, acres and acres of the great white blanket stretching into the horizon. The cold is terrible but bet you’d love it here, he wrote. Again: a friend in New York. Puppy’s first snow! Again: from Ottawa. Saw your roller rink videos, here’s one at the ice skating rink here. Snow, snow, snow. I played it over and over again. It wasn’t the actual thing, it was an impression of an impression. But it was real, too.
