TO MARIANNE: February 2014

Wednesday 26 February 2014

Day 393 - Brief Memory of Snow

When I was a child it used to snow for months at a time. It would fall in heavy torrents and layer itself claustrophobically over the town like a bed sheet pulled tight at the edges. The horizon seemed to swallow itself, visible only by the tops of fir trees peeking at the fringes. All around was snow, thick great walls and meticulous drifts as tall as houses. It fell nightly; noiseless and erratic. Cementing doors shut and swallowing whole buildings. It fell in clumps, it fell in snowballs and stuck to window panes and slid down or remained there to freeze. It lasted so long until everything faded and the world was one great blanket of snow and you had no memory of what lay underneath.

Not that we minded, they were happy times. Trapped as we were with no sight or sound from the outside world. All work stopped. Schools closed. The children of the town would play together. You hands would become so cold you couldn't feel them but it didn't matter. Nothing really mattered. The snow fell and fell and you would watch it until your eyes hurt.

For those months the only news of the world came through a blizzard of static from transistor radios pulled tightly to our ears. Quiet voices that seemed to whisper to you out of the snow itself.

You see this was long ago when the world was still quiet and small and you could forgive yourself for thinking that nothing else existed beyond the limits of what you could see. This was long before the television, long before technology shrank the world and the picture became painfully clear.

I can barely remember any of it now. When I think of it's like another world entirely. The faces have grown so faint. The winters now aren't the same. Nothing ever comes to a halt. Nothing stops the world from turning. It all changes so much and so quickly. One year is very much like any other.