The 8th Day of Christmas: "Snow Day"

Right to it: the Eighth Day is (was) called “Snow Day.”  Although the term is pregnant with meaning for schoolchildren everywhere, alas, school’s already out and we are left with the awareness and celebration of snow, that brightening white stuff that is so sorely missed when it’s gone, plants and leaves lie dead everywhere, and the weather outside is frightfully dank and gray. 

The fact of Central Illinois’s’s’s dreary winters led me to channel the following from the spirit world, which, strange as it may seem, is not immune to Illinois's winter blues:

Central Illinois Christmas Poem of Woe 
by Central Illinois

Gray above,
Brown below.
If I could, I would I'd
Call out the sun,
down the snow.

Snow gets a bad rap, thanks to the inconvenience it causes.  Sometimes it even grinds The Machine to a halt, and even busy people must stay home (although I suspect the Internet will one day mean that we will all be able to work and do school completely from home somehow, so Goodbye, snow days!)  Snow brightens things up considerably, and just the fact of this extra light has been enough, in years past, to lift me out of a dreary funk.  Feeling brightened, and bemused, and wonderstruck one fine day, post-snowfall, I wrote some more upbeat verses:

POOLS AND FLAKES

new powder, clean and light,

dropped last night,

banks the windward corners of

lawns and beds

with bright snow-shadows

it rests in cracks and pocks

of sidewalk and street,

whitens the hollows

in black dirt and brown leaf

it pools without puddling or rippling,

off-white and quiet

until clear sun pushes hard through the

wandering, luminescent seams

between the blue-gray curtain-clouds

that float and morph and ponder form:

the light chases all hint

of shadow, shade, tint or texture

from the surface of these frosty puddles,

flashing back to the very first white

…the deep-breath rush of gusts

does sky make wind or wind make sky?

bit by bit strips the dark tree skeletons of their skunk-stripes of white

a weave of interlocked crystals,

layered and caked,

It lifts the snow as flakes again

through the wending light

—where they all wink

like tiny shards of mirror flying past—

revealing the light’s invisible beams through the air.

the wind pushes the snowflakes along

from behind, toward the East,

but I had never thought:

it’s drawing them in its wake as well,

from the West

—Well, it impels them, either way:

now with straight-line speed,

now in regular curves, roller-coastering, 
riding the tension between traveling wind

and gravity's down-draw home

each curvaceous line of white

ascends unseen slopes, cresting, diving, and again:

a wave now, as in radio-, as in micro-, as in gamma-

matter made energy by motion?

each spoked and faceted, flat flake

—think about it!—

coin-flips, cartwheels, stalls and spins

its way through the rush forwards,

as a silver coin flops its irregular way down through water:

when one angled surface or the other

meets the light and bats! it to my eye

—it's matter again, made,

a particle as I observe,

destined to, with a flea-sized sound

of shattering ice,

strike against house or tree.

each flake winks at me

several times in its journey

from the right side of window one

to the left frame-edge of window two

…thousands, then, of winks—lifetimes.

I could have missed it.

...Although I appreciate the snow, I really wish that when it does fall the view out my front window weren’t of houses and streets with their ugly gray slush, but of a rolling landscape, woods and meadows, river and horizon gladdened by their frosting of white.  I want the postcard, not the reality. 

I can also appreciate snow and ice in an existential way, as the force opposing unbridled heat.  Heat is Yang, cold is Yin, and a cycling balance must exist between them--or we die, either burned to ash or frozen through.  In a nutshell, I’m glad Earth is not a total oven or freezer, even if it means enduring the pendulum from Summer's sauna to Winter’s cold and drear.  

The world as we know it today is the product of a succession of ice ages.  Far from being a deadly scourge, the ice spawned a stunning diversity of large, cold-hardy animals.  Here in North America we had charismatic megafauna everywhere, as in the savannahs of Africa--only much hairier.  Many of them finally died out along with the glaciers themselves around 12,000 years ago, leaving us only the moose and bison here in some of the Lower 48.  What’s more, the glaciers left ridiculously fertile soil in their wake, and the cold, snow and ice all keep germs, molds and tropical diseases at bay.  

 Ice is nice, if you take the long view.  When was the last time you thanked it, instead of just bitching about it, or tossing salt at it?  I do not think I ever have given thanks to the ice before, but one gift of writing is the way it helps you appreciate things you have never thought about much—so, hey, thank you, ice and snow and cold.  

Thank you, too, snow pants and wool socks, scarf and hat.  When I come in from shoveling, I am not cold at all.  Au contraire, I am packed in sweaty winterwear.  Once, when I stripped my upper body down to my long johns in the single-digit temps, as I stood in the dark by the back porch light, I could see the water vapor steaming off of me as if I were a boiling pot of water.  To think that, in warmer conditions, in spite of the intensity of its sweat production, without the cold the vaporized stuff would be invisible!

I will end on this note:  the next time we do get some good packing snow (this year, who knows when and if that’ll be?), you need not limit yourself to making a traditional snowman.  One of my best winter memories is of making a snow ape on my front lawn.  I was pleased with the results, yes, but the best part was losing myself (finding myself?) in the creative act.  For that time, I was in the Zone, and no worries.  It’s true that some random driver later on took the trouble to ride up on my lawn and smash my creation to bits, but I had already had my fun and bless him, I’ll bet he had his….Another time, I made a space alien (see photo below).  A creative act is a beautiful thing, but doesn’t have to be snow sculpture.  You could write a haiku about the snow, or like my wife make a bunch of paper snowflakes.  Unhook, I say, any concerns about the quality of the product and become one with the Process.

Note: I think it would be perfectly appropriate to write a scathing limerick or bitter poetic lines about the fact that we rarely get much snow around here (Central Illinois) anymore.  It sucks, sucks, sucks!  But happy Snow Day!

Here's my limerick:

There was once a region that sucks
Our Winter could give us two fucks
There's no goddamn snow
Only dead mud below
--Relocate, you big bunch o' schmucks!

(Or, don't take it too serious)

MUSICAL CHOICES: Here is my YouTube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zl_kJwz0yx4&list=PLdartdqjh56DqTwei5C4KDTRzTV4NbFpj 
The Ronettes - Frosty The Snowman
Enya - White Is In The Winter Night
Dean Martin/Ella Fitzgerald - Let it Snow!
White Christmas by Kathy Chapman
Snowman-Bare Naked Ladies
When the Snow Falls- A.J. Jenkins
Loreena McKennitt - Snow
Snow on High Ground by Nightnoise
Slowly Fall The Snowflakes by Bill Carroll
Pet Shop Boys - It Doesn't Often Snow at Christmas

Johnny's Snowman-Deanna Carter
Snowfall - Tony Bennett
Celtic Christmas 3- A Raven in the Snow
Celtic Christmas 3- Angels in the Snow
Snowfall Lullaby-Barbara Higbie
Grey Funnel Line / Rain into Snow - William Coulter
Booker T & The Mgs Silver Bells - Winter Snow
"Snowblind"-Black Sabbath

Bing Crosby ft the Andrew Sisters - Jingle Bells

Simon & Garfunkel - A Hazy Shade Of Winter

They Might Be Giants - New York City

The Dismemberment Plan - The Ice of Boston

The Walkmen - While I Shovel The Snow

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Fifteen Feet Of Pure White Snow

Fleet Foxes - White Winter Hymnal

Billie Holiday & Her Orchestra - I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm

Gil Scott Heron "Winter In America"