The Sounds of Winter
A snow day in South Texas
It is a snow day! An actual snow day, not ice or sleet, that melts once it hits the ground or creates black ice on roads, or even tiny flurries of snow we occasionally see that melts when it lands, only accumulating enough to dirty gardens and pavement, mingling with leaves, dead grass, and mud. This is inches of snow, soft and powdery. I can sink my hand into it, leaving my print. Hero, our dog, left paw prints and other things during his morning outside time—he lifted his paws up like a pony fluffing the powder, leaning his head down to sniff the ground before realizing there was no ground to sniff, giving himself a snowy mustache.
I ran my hands over the snow, mixing it like a bowl of sugar—it stayed soft and fine. I have the living room window blinds pushed up and the curtains tied to the side—I did this in nearly every room so I could be surrounded by the blindingly white light reflecting off the snow and see it in any room of the house, the house will have to work harder to stay warm but who knows if I will ever experience this again. I want to see the snow as it falls, to feel like I am inside a snow globe. I don’t have many metaphors for describing snow beyond the most obvious. I have plenty for living in the swampy South, “it feels chowder today,” “thick,” and “like taking a second shower,” but not for this—the language for it is simple, childlike, magic I rarely experience. The Inuit have dozens of words for snow, and I have dozens of phrases to describe the hot, humid Gulf Coast.
With the windows open, I can see a Corgi in a jacket hopping and bouncing through the snow and a man walking a Husky waving at me—sometimes, the South is pleasant.
I went onto the front porch to look at the snow on our lawn. The grass had vanished, and the blanket of white had not been touched—it was perfectly smooth. Snow continues to fall, and I can hear it, a sound I’ve never heard. Quiet, dazzling, no cars or people, a rare lack of sounds in such a big city, just birds chirping and flapping from bare branch to bare branch and the clear, gentle whispers of snow falling. It felt reminiscent of the early days of lockdown nearly five years ago. Quiet, except for the birds and the slow release of spring leaves and buds pushing through still soil while my feet kept pace on the pavement around the same loops in a mile radius. Although that time was uncertain, I looked out at the falling snow today and realized I hadn’t witnessed beauty in quite the same way until today as we entered a new kind of uncertainty.
Yesterday, sitting in the house at the kitchen table, I heard something popping, like a single pop rock, in someone else’s mouth, a light fizz. I shot my eyes toward the direction of the sound, thinking it was a bug crawling around a potted plant or less menacing, the house creaking in a corner after a shock of cold from outside and the heat turning off inside. The popping continued and began to feel slightly eerie. I silently walked over to the corner, leaning closer to each plant, tilting my right ear towards each, listening, tracking the small pops. The pink hyacinth bulb from Trader Joe’s? I picked up the glass vase, the bulb nestled in, and waited for the sound, holding it near my ear like a botanical seashell, holding my breath. It was popping and expanding—the hyacinth florets were pushing through the sworded leaves, forcing themselves out of their green vice, up and out. This wasn’t perceptive to the eye, and even after researching online, I found out that you can’t actually hear plants growing. At least, the human ear can’t, but I could hear it.
When I woke this morning to snow on the ground, I found the hyacinth florets had expanded out overnight.
Now I hear the snow melting, dripping off the side of the house, forming long, wobbly icicles—the heat is blowing in the house.
We got snow in NC and it was magical ✨