The First Snow

The first snow.  I am not immune to its charms.  It brings back cherished memories of building snow tunnels, walking to school on the top of the banks and shoveling endlessly with parents and neighbors and childhood friends.

One late afternoon stands out in particular.  It was the last day of school before Christmas break.  I stay after to help my teachers erase chalk boards but mostly to talk with them, to soak up their magnanimous authority, which I squirrel away in my heart to be summonsed when amidst the duller spirits that can arise at home.  It is the first snow of the season, late December, and as it always seems to do, the snow brings a hush to the city.  Already late, the sun is down, a luminous twilight hovers over the neighborhoods through which I walk the mile home.  I am at the top of my street, two long city blocks of what once stood for the best of the mid-century's middle class, but is already ever so slightly turning into a dark night of poverty, crime and want.   That is all in the future.  This experience was truly in the moment.  The snow is falling softly.  I decide that my best view is taken while walking down the middle of the street.

An eleven or twelve year old Catholic school girl, in uniform, suspended between school and home, alone, gloriously alone for a few minutes that are neither a nun's or a priest's, a mother's or a father's, no matter what is good or bad about any of them, this is a young person's moment to be alone, safe, quiet, and slowly sucking on a piece of the sweet Christmas candy that we all waited for every year as if it were a pot of gold, all the love in the world, the nourishment needed to sustain us through confessions and masses, multiplication tables and spelling bees, the sting of adolescent gossip, the dictation girls took from obedient mothers and blows boys absorbed from abusive and often drunk fathers, and for one night in the first snow of the season, it was all beautiful.