Nature
Early Memories Of Snow
From Trapped In A Safe Environment To Safe In The Wild
Although fascinated by the story of snow, I didn’t immediately consider picking up the challenge of writing about it. Snow does not play a huge part in my life. I live in a temperate climate where it is not unusual for whole years to pass by with no snow at all. However, the idea settled somewhere and nudged my subconscious.
Stuck!
One of my earliest memories involves snow. I was 3 years old, feeling the freedom of being all alone in a landscape made unfamiliar by a thick blanket of snow. There was not a grown-up in sight as I — muffled in a snowsuit with a giant hood, feet snug in big boots, hands warm inside gloves without fingers that made my hands look like paws — played in the garden outside our kitchen door.
The snow was deep but I was light enough to be able to skip over the surface without sinking. That annoyed me. I wanted to make my mark. I jumped to create footprints, but they were shallow compared to the trail left by my father earlier in the day. Unable to make a satisfactory impression, I did the next best thing and climbed into the deepest footprints I could find.
It was fun pretending I had made these giant impressions in the snow until I realized I was stuck. They were too deep and I couldn’t climb out, certainly not when semi-immobilized by my massive snowsuit and giant mittens.
Stuck! No one in sight. The freedom of all alone becoming suddenly scary. What if night fell?
I’m not sure what happened next but I lived to tell the tale. I expect I did the 3-year-old thing of emitting panicked wails until a grown-up came to rescue me.
Trapped Or Not?
A later memory is more fragmented. No fear or panic is attached to this one. It is only in hindsight that it looks like we might really have been in trouble. I would have been under 10 but in single figures. I was with at least one parent and one sibling, but the details are blurry.
Deep snow again but this time out in the wilds — somewhere on the Peak District moors. The snow was thick on the ground. The Peak District was a favourite weekend destination at any time of year; in the snow for sledging, in the summer for long hikes and picnics. This particular memory shows me a thick white blanket over everything and a sudden storm whipping up.
Then there was a makeshift cave. We were on a steep slope and used the space between the gnarled roots of an old tree. It became an adventure to pack ourselves in out of the storm which became a whiteout. Looking back, I wonder if we had wandered too far, the storm had arrived too fast, and we lost our safe route back to the road. The moorland is beautiful but full of hidden traps. That thick white blanket obliterated our tracks and changed the shape of the landscape. I think we sheltered there until the storm abated, and it’s at the edge of memory that our climb down the hill was painstaking with an adult testing every step to be sure it wasn’t a hidden crevasse or a cliff edge.
Christmas Snow
Then there was the Christmas morning snow. We travelled to our maternal grandmother’s house every Christmas and woke on Christmas morning to a white landscape. But was every Christmas a white Christmas? I never questioned it when young. As we’ve all grown up, we have compared notes, and yes we all remember that iconic view on Christmas morning — white over.
The climate was different then, and we were in a different part of the country, but snow …? Every Christmas without fail …? Our grandmother was quite the matriarch who always had things her way and she enjoyed delivering a white Christmas for her extended family, but could she really order the weather to do her bidding the way she did with everyone else? We discussed it between us and concluded that having known her, we wouldn’t rule it out.
For more angles on snow, ranging from childhood games through hot/cold contrasts, to metaphors for life itself, dip into this collection of stories and verse from Susan Alison, Mary Chang Story Writer, & Duncan Klein:
And here is the piece from Dr. Preeti Singh that inspired me to write this: