A Snow Story

And now it’s December.

The first snow of the season fell the night before last – less than half an inch all told, but it touched every tree and surface with magic, the morning sun sparkling on it all until it melted away. 

The story below is the tale of my first snow, and one of my oldest memories. Though I am aware that I don’t really remember all of it – perhaps very little of it, indeed. I was very young, and over the years my father would tell it to me many a time, always with that big grin of his, delighting in the memory as if it were a keepsake. I cannot now distinguish what is his memory and what is my own, other than a timeless image of great, primal drifts of snow, higher than my head, like the vastness of the arctic wastes.

When I was born in 1964, my parents had been living in a large apartment building in central Queens. Three years later, we moved to a house in Fresh Meadows, a much more suburban neighborhood, in the northeastern part of the borough.

Our new house was on a quiet side street near the Long Island Expressway. Connecting the city to the still semi-rural east end of the island, the Expressway was notorious for its heavy traffic and frequent traffic jams, thus earning it the popular nickname “The World’s Longest Parking Lot.” In later years I would come to refer to it as “the great poison artery of Long Island.”

In the winter after we moved in, there was a great snowstorm, one of the historical record-breakers for the New York metropolitan area. Traffic in the city ground to a halt as everyone waited out the storm, grateful to be warm and cozy in our homes.

When the snow stopped falling and the winds died down, my father asked me if I wanted to take a walk in the snow, and I said yes. I’ve always loved snow, though I’ve never gotten enough of it here in the city. This would be my first memory of it.

He bundled me up in my tiny winter coat and boots and fuzzy pink hat with the pompom on top, and we walked out hand in hand to see what the Expressway looked like.

The world was still and quiet and empty of all but snow, as I remember it, as we made our way through the deserted streets. When we reached the margin of the Expressway, we were greeted with an extraordinary sight: a vast sea of undulating white drifts, running down the grassy shoulder of the highway to the roadbed, stretching out silent and empty like the Arctic wastes.

And then, when my father’s attention was diverted for a moment for some reason or other that I cannot remember, I ran off and disappeared among the drifts.

I can’t myself remember why I did that, though I know that I couldn’t possibly ever have resisted a world all of snow to dive into! Meanwhile, a jolt of fear gripped my father as he looked left and right, up and down across the snows. I was nowhere to be seen.

And then, then, he saw it:

A little pink pompom, peeking above the top of a drift.

With a big grin on his face, he ran on down the embankment to rescue me, flopping a little awkwardly from drift to drift – and the pompom disappeared again.

And then, at the edge of the next drift –

Pompom!

And disappeared again, and then suddenly again, over there –

Pompom!

And then finally, at the still and empty roadbed, he found me and, laughing aloud in relief and for the sheer delight of my brazen, daring escape to the temporary wilderness, scooped me up, and we walked back home together among the snows.