To Snow Falling, the Moment it Stops and the Moment Right After That

[This is a re-post from last February. For a lot of reasons, I'm going to pause this writing experiment. I hope to still get 365 letters written in a year's time, but right now, I have to turn my attention elsewhere. I'll repost old ones and perhaps look for some more famous ones to keep the love coming. Thanks for reading!]

SUNY-Binghamton, New York, October, 1987. 10 PM at the Student Union, waiting for the bus. I’m looking out the window, and slowly, it begins. Like a school play. Bits falling, just a scatter, just a hint until, minutes later, the snow thickens. I think rain? but it’s not coming down like rain. It’s October. Snow? For me, moving from Dallas just four months ago, snow in October is as likely as snow in July. Snow? A young man approaches me and asks, “Is it snow?” He is from Central America. He’s heard about snow. We could walk out the door, feel it for ourselves, but instead we just stand there, together at the window. I’ve never felt a quiet like this.

January, Conklin Avenue. Moving into a house with Vanessa and Kim. Vanessa plays the Cramps and in the morning she eats cereal with water when we are out of milk. She wears dark blue jeans and Chuck Taylors. Black curls tangle around her eyes. She has no poker face. She speaks German and she doesn’t know it yet, but in the years to come she will be an ex-pat. Kim wears long wool skirts in January, thick, striped socks with her Birkenstock sandals. Fed up with the system, she dropped out of school and works at a co-op whole foods restaurant. She has a sister, but no real family. She says it doesn’t bother her.

I take the room facing the street. The room with the large picture window. I’ve never spent a whole winter up north before and now, deep into it, I find it terrifying. Dark. Cold. Dark. The smell of cold lingers on coats and hats when someone comes in from the outside. I smell it on Vanessa when she comes back from class. I’m sitting on my bed, which is just a mattress on the floor, watching the snow fall and fall again.

3 AM. I wake to the sound of the city plows on my street. I watch them go by, scraping the road clean. In 20 minutes, I can’t tell the plow has been there. The snow has filled in all the lines. The plow comes through again, and again, the snow fills it in. Across the street, a milk bottling plant. Shift change. Smoke breaks. People stepping out, looking down. In the top row of windows, I see the machines inside, running all night. Milk poured into the jugs. Snow deepens. Does it ever stop?

The truth is, I don’t want it to stop. It’s working. The world is quiet. The neighbors upstairs are quiet. The peace that comes with a day’s-long snow storm settles on the edges of everything: the top of the chain-link fence, a twig, eyelashes. When it ends, we will have to begin digging and driving, forcing our lives back out into the streets, the classrooms, the diners.

The snow. The moment it stops. And the moment just after.

The breaking. The sound of the breaking. The silence just after.