Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Snowstorm
This wasn’t taken during the snowstorm I’m writing about. But I’m taking artistic license here—and besides, the picture is too pretty not to use.
As I write this post on Sunday afternoon, the sky above New York City is finally blue again. Finally! This week we had a long stretch of cold, gray, snowy, slushy days. I will admit that, even though I usually love the snow (growing up in a ski town will do that to you), by Friday afternoon I was getting tired of it. The snow felt like another unwelcome reminder of how much more winter we have left. I can’t wait for spring. I miss sunshine and t-shirts and iced coffee. When was the last time I went outside without a hat and mittens and scarf and boots and the prospect of a drippy nose behind my mask? Was it seventeen years ago? Something like that?
My moods have been all over the place during Covid. They come and go like waves. On Friday afternoon—despite it being Friday afternoon, which is, for my money, the very best part of the week, the ramp-down of work and the ramp-up of the weekend—I was feeling … I don’t know, off. (Stop me if I’ve said this before.) Stir-crazy but also tired. Bored but also overwhelmed. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the weather, or maybe it was just life. But I had a few errands to run, and even as I slightly dreaded the prospect of the wet and the cold, I was glad to have those errands. This pandemic has gone on long enough for me to learn that a walk, a dose of fresh air, a change of scenery—no matter the weather—is always good for me. No exceptions. (Sometimes I invent errands just to hold myself accountable. Could I have waited a few days to return that library book? Of course. But my Past Self arbitrarily decided that I would return that library book on, I don’t know, Tuesday, and therefore on Tuesday, I am going to return that library book, goddamn it.)
So on Friday afternoon, I put on my stupid hat and mittens and scarf, and queued up a podcast, and set out. It was still snowing. The flakes, viewed from our apartment window, were very pretty. Fat, slow, movie-like. But to be walking up Lexington Avenue, and to be moving through those flakes—to be in them, not separate from them—turned them into something far more sublime. All I could think to myself was: this is the most perfect snowfall I’ve ever seen.
I completed my errand, but I could feel that the walk was shifting my mood. (My Past Self can be annoying, but she is often right). I had podcasts to catch up on. I had nowhere else to be (lol, when do I ever have somewhere else to be?). So I kept walking, and eventually stopped at the Eli’s on Madison and 91st to get a coffee. I’d never been in this particular Eli’s. The last time I was in that space must have been a decade ago, when it was still a Jackson Hole. I ordered my coffee, and then waited off to the side. Beyond the pass-through, I could see the cooks in the kitchen prepping for dinner service. I remembered how much I missed restaurants. I’ve done outdoor dining, but I haven’t eaten inside a restaurant since March 7, 2020. (A jam-packed Locanda Verde, three of my college roommates, sharing appetizers, shouting to be heard over the noise. It’s a freaking miracle none of us got Covid that night.) I waited for my coffee, and looked around, and felt so happy to be in that space. Silverware wrapped in red-and-white napkins. A massive cheeseboard, the names of each cheese written on the glass cover. The soft lighting, the wooden tables. These days the littlest things can strike me as absurdly beautiful.
I walked down 91st, past the Cooper Hewitt, and went into the park at the Engineer’s Gate. At the end of this week of eternal winter, there was some kind of replenishing magic to the snow, to the pale lilac sky above the park. As I walked around the reservoir, listening to my podcast and sipping my coffee, this fragment, for some reason, popped into my head:
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
I knew it was from a poem, but I couldn’t remember which poem. The words formed a soft loop in my mind. It was snowing / And it was going to snow. I don’t know why I found those words to be soothing, but I did. It was snowing / And it was going to snow. Where was that from? Maybe it wasn’t a poem—was it James Joyce, was it the end of “The Dead”? No, no. I was certain it was a poem. I could visualize the line break, even if I couldn’t see the author or the title. I made a mental note to Google it later. I kept walking. Cross-country skiiers gliding along the bridle path. Kids sledding down hills. Runners, braver than me, logging slippery miles.
The moods come and go like waves. Sometimes I feel helpless in their grip, because how am I supposed to change them when my world is so very small? The answer, I am learning, is both wonderfully and frustratingly simple. You just keep going. At the heart of it, you just keep going.
By the time I got home from my longer-than-planned walk, that fragment had slipped back out of mind. I got distracted by other exciting Friday night questions, like what kind of pizza should we order, like what movie should we watch. I didn’t actually bother Googling those lines until a few minutes ago, while writing this post. The poem, of course, is incredibly famous. I have no idea where I first encountered it—high school?—maybe almost two decades ago, at this point. I like the poem, but it’s not like I’m a Wallace Stevens superfan, or anything like that. I don’t know why that fragment stuck with me, and I don’t know why it chose to come back to me on Friday afternoon. But I do know that I am grateful for it. The poetry made poetry out of my Friday afternoon trudge through the snow.
How can this not be kind of magical? Your brain files away some scrap of information. You go years and years without thinking about it. The world keeps changing. Your life keeps changing, your moods keep changing. But you keep going, and sometimes those scraps come back to you as you sip your coffee, as you put one foot in front of the other, and they are just the right thing. You thank your Past Self for paying attention in English class when you were sixteen. Those words are the littlest thing. The littlest thing strikes you as absurdly beautiful. You stop finding that absurd. You do your best to embrace it.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.