How snow brings out the child in all of us
IWAS up at 6am yesterday, about three hours before I usually rise, to walk alone through the thick virgin snow. A fox had been through the garden before me, the tracks of his paws traversing the blanket of white that covered the lawn, stopping briefly to investigate a small blue plastic ball belonging to one of the dogs, and then proceeding on through a hole in the hedge.
The fox probably travels this track around dawn, but has never left evidence of his nocturnal wanderings before the snow.
At first light, everything was quiet, the thick covering of snow insulating the usual morning sounds of early traffic.
But there were sounds; the wing beat of a flock of geese who usually find fertile feeding grounds on their way north, but now had to divert to the shore in search of grazing.
The red breast of a robin against the white background, as it perched on its thin legs waiting for the crumbs to be thrown from the breadboard to sustain it during the cold spell.
Later, as the wind rose, flurries of white powder blew from the galvanised old dairy shed at the back of the house.
There is something primal and poetic about snow, a quality that no other weather can bring no matter how much we talk about it.
For me, it brings back memories of Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘A Christmas Childhood’:
“One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –
How wonderful that was, how wonderful!
And when we put our ears to the paling-post
The music that came out was magical.”
It brings out the child in most of us; the memories come floating back like falling snowflakes.
A small farm in Longford, filling a bottle with water and putting it out beside the water tank on a cold, frosty, star-filled night and finding the glass broken but the ice in the shape of a bottle standing in the snow.
The simple pleasures of a pre-television age.
Making snowballs until our woollen gloves, knitted by our mother, were soaked; our hands red raw with the cold; noses running like leaking taps and the cold seeping through holes in our boots. Finally giving in and going inside where the turf fire was burning brightly in the grate and puddles formed on the floor.
Snow, especially with these big snowstorms that come every decade, becomes a uniting force among people.
Neighbours who rarely speak become closer as they battle the elements, shovelling pathways and roads to keep them open, stopping to chat where often they pass each other unseeing, checking on older neighbours who may not always be able to deal with the elements.
People try to find ways to take pleasure in its unusual presence, hauling pieces of board to the nearest hills to go sliding down half-terrified, half-exhilarated by the speed and exotic nature of it all.
It also has a romantic feeling that no other weather conditions can bring. At the end of James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, Gabriel looks forlornly out his hotel window in O’Connell Street as Gretta dreams of her lost love.
“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westwards. Yes, the newspapers
There is something primal and poetic about snow, a quality that no other weather can bring no matter how much we talk about it