My wife, Julia, and I moved from New York to California seven years ago this weekend, and the first days of February always remind us of this migration. We’d shipped our belongings and slept at a friend’s, and the cobblestones of Van Brunt Street were thick with ice when we awoke and jumped in a taxi to the airport with tears streaming down our cheeks. That winter we fled was brutal, and since then we’ve decidedly grown soft. A mild frost, or a morning in the forties, feels now frigid, and the idea of single digit temperatures is appalling, but at times like this, we do get some snow envy.
Seeing photos of my snowbound homeland brings many feelings: the frozen web of nose hairs with every inhalation, the snowball that hits the neck or cheek just right and slides under the scarf to melt, and numb toes thawing at the fireside. But these and other memories cannot capture the magical, transporting effect of a heavy snowfall, which erases objects, replacing them with curves and brightness, and muffles sound to a near-silent softness, with flakes that meander to the ground, suspended and swirling in the breeze like a sleepy school of fish, creating a sense of slow and sweeping motion within the stillness.
In our adopted land, we have ocean vistas and clear night skies to remind us of the boundlessness of nature, and of our connection to this greatness, beyond all capability of calculation, measurement, or imitation. These sights are similarly nourishing, but there’s nothing quite like lying on one’s back, cradled by the snow, in stillness and silence, regarding an endless field of slowly falling flakes.
For the moment, we’ll happily take the rain, the frost, and the forties of February, and they’ll feel now nearly as cold as that icy morning in Brooklyn seven years ago. Here in Oakland, we see rainbows in winter, we take sunset hikes in the hills, and lately, I’ve been getting a glimpse of the sublime in a simple glass of red Bordeaux, which I raise to my shivering peeps back east.
Cheers,
Max