Snow
January 23, 2008Basking under the sizzling sun and crazy all-night-long dancing under the sky were followed by a flight up north. In three hours, Florida morphed into Vermont. After summer came winter. As I stepped out of the airport, my face twisted into an ugly grimace of anger and bitterness. Shivering, I grabbed some snow from the ground. Despite the painful kisses that my fingers received from this evil white mass, I started pressing it frantically between my hands. Once my perfectly round, tennis-ball-sized snowball was done, I threw it on the ground with all my might while squeaking, “I hate you!”
This does a nice job of capturing the mixed-blessing-ness of winter and snow. This piece is so charged with contrasts (painful kisses, evil white, stepping off the plane – usually a happy image – and grimacing, making something perfect and throwing it on the ground) that it’s hard to tell what the final, resounding emotion will be, and I think that that conveys exactly how snow can make one feel; like winter in general, it can seem like both the best and the worst thing in the same moment.