One Boy’s Rare Winter Wonderland
December 13, 2013
By Tom Poland
December 13, 2013
Magic Was Literally In The Air
My childhood days unfolded in a remarkable manner. They were as simple as a hammer. My family and I were, in a way, cut off from civilization. Woods surrounded our home out in the country, and we had a rudimentary phone: a party line that rarely rang.
The Information Age had yet to materialize and in those uncomplicated days, we had no Weather Channel to tell us days in advance that snow was coming. It either came or it didn’t, and most of time, living in eastern Georgia and far from the mountains as we were, it didn’t. But when it did, well, it provided joy like no other weather can.
Magical mornings. My parents would wake me up. Look out the window.
There it was! A winter wonderland rare and sublime. There it was, that crystalline miracle, snow. Gold dust might as well have fallen during the night. Adrenalin surged through me. Mere sleeping had transported me to the land of the midnight sun and ice and snow. An altogether new architecture redefined all that was familiar into white lines and soft, glistening curves. It was as if a milky species of kudzu had carpeted the county, as if whipped cream had frosted planet Earth.
A Winter Wonderland
Soon my sisters and I were marring the perfect surface with our tracks. (I always hated making tracks on that smooth, perfect surface. I was ruining the only perfect thing I’d known.)
On those rare, snow-blanketed mornings if I happened to awaken first, I could tell something was different: a strange, soft silence muted the sounds of morning. A distant car seemed to slush along the Augusta Highway. And then I’d notice that the light seeping around the blinds and curtains seemed bluish. Peeking through the window, I got a jolt. Snow had fallen.
Sugar-Coated Suburbia
Memories of childhood snows live within me still. Those snows of childhood held magic. Few things rival the spellbinding beauty of quarter-sized flakes cartwheeling through the air. Mesmerized by their fall, I knew that nothing but good could come from flakes like that. No school. A snowman. A friendly snowball fight. Snow ice cream! Just skim a layer off the car roof into a bowl, mix in sugar, vanilla extract, and milk and, voilà, ice cream!
Freshly fallen snow meant a chance to walk through dead-quiet wintry woods that seemed more like Robert Frost’s Vermont, though I had never been to Vermont. But there with the boughs crusted white, limbs sporting a meringue of white and creaking a bit and the ground softly cloudlike, the woods behind home seemed New England-like. As I walked through the forest back home, my boots crunched and squeaked, a deafening noise in that dampened winter wonderland.
Soft Lines And Muffled Woods
Suddenly the creatures of the woods revealed themselves in a way like no other. Tracks galore. Just to see if we could, Dad and I once tracked a rabbit until we found it sitting as still as stone, melding into a patch of brown leaves so perfectly seeing it came as a shock. Raccoon tracks and birds did their part to stencil wintry wildlife patterns onto the snow. A snowfall reveals evidence of the denizens of woods and fields like no other time. It’s a powdery lab where biology refuses to be ignored.
A snowfall made for a time of adventurous survival too. Those rare days of childhood snow sometimes knocked out the power. That meant tomato soup warmed over gas space heaters, wet clothes, and freezing hands and toes. And even that misery held its own peculiar brand of joy.
Layers Of Meringue
All those magical winter moments live in a place called Recollection. To this day, snow unleashes a medley of memorable experiences in childhood and the remarkable thing is those memories retain their magic forever. As I write, I see a nine-year-old boy, Tommy, donning a cheap parka and gloves. Soon his fingers will burn from snow’s icy flames, but he won’t care.
My Dad, as many dads did in the ’50s, bought a Bell & Howell 8 millimeter camera and made home movies. To this day, I can see the snowfall he captured on film; I want to say it’s the winter or late spring of 1958. I do believe it’s April. A late snow. Our dog, Duke, romps in the snow. Mom holds up a handmade sign giving the date and I believe the snow’s depth of eight inches. The film jerks and swings wildly. Suddenly someone else is filming and my father runs into the camera: red from the cold, his heavy 5 o’clock shadow evident. Closer he comes, his face near the lens. Mom always said that shot made him look like an escaped convict. He was just 32 years old. He was a boy playing in the snow. Snow makes children of us Southerners. That’s its true beauty.
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Snow today? It means a hassle for those who drive to work. Here in the city, as traffic snarls and fender benders break out like some metallic rash, body shop owners anticipate a windfall.
Well before the snow arrives (it usually doesn’t), schools start giving notice that there’ll be a three-hour delay the next morning or even better as kids go, no school at all. But generally all that happens is a huge front of disappointment moves through. You could say a depression settles in ’cause every kid’s spirit plummets when snow fails to materialize.
It’s just a fact of life. Southern weathermen today are no good at predicting snow. Whenever a weatherman says it’s a certainty snow is coming, I know it’s not. But that doesn’t stop people from making a run on bread, milk, and soup at all the grocery stores. As soon as weathermen—those new celebrities born of clouds and climate—predict snow, people rise up like a horde of locusts and strip the shelves bare.
I can’t speak for you, but I much prefer the old days when a blanket of snow, thin though it may be, caught us by surprise. You wake up and there it is covering the land, an unanticipated veneer of confectioner’s sugar.
The allure of the exotic and the magic of discovery I guess is where the joy of snow came from in my youth.
Things changed, sadly. Now it’s unwise to eat snow ice cream. The air is filled with toxic particles, pollution, and other particulates that put snow ice cream on the do not eat list. Thanks a lot progress. And driving in the snow amounts to a demolition derby down here where it doesn’t snow enough to justify snow plows. When it does snow, some northern transplants like to make fun of us, both our unbridled glee and our traffic troubles. My Gawd, it’s just a little snow. (Perhaps some of you recall the July 1995 heat wave that struck up North. In Chicago, 525 people died. My God, it was just a little heat.)
So, here we are in December with the coldest months of all, January and February, yet to come. Is there a chance we’ll have a record snow like the one that hit in 1973? I don’t know and I am doubly sure weather forecasters don’t know. Here’s hoping weathermen get it right just once this winter. Give the kids some snow, but do us a favor. Don’t predict it. If you and your learned ways and satellites know for sure snow is coming, don’t forecast it. Let a new generation of children experience the magic of a surprise Southern snowfall.
No Work, No School Today
For children’s sake, I hope they go to bed one night dreading a test at school the next day. And then throughout the night, here they come: fluffy alabaster flakes tumbling onto southern earth, a soft whispering accompanying their fall. Early the next morning, the world seems bluish and quiet.
And then dad or mom or both come into the bedroom. Look out the window.
A day of magic, one the kids will remember the rest of their life, is about to unfold.
All Photos by Tom Poland
Visit Tom Poland’s website at www.tompoland.net
Email Tom about most anything. [email protected]
Tom Poland is the author of seven books and more than 700 magazine features. A Southern writer, his work has appeared in magazines throughout the South. The University of South Carolina Press just released his book on how the blues became the shag, Save The Last Dance For Me. He writes a weekly column for newspapers in Georgia and South Carolina about the South, its people, traditions, lifestyle, and changing culture.
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