We awaken to snow. The first big snow, which I love as much as I hate the snows that will follow, when the magic becomes ordinary and the ordinary becomes tiresome. The magic of the first snow lies in its ability to clear the slate for a brief time, to transform the familiar overnight.
We go to bed while it’s windy and rainy and cold. We awaken, and the maple trees in the front yard have been dipped in meringue. The branches still hold too many leaves and the boughs are heavy now, dipping over the front lawn, a curtain of white and dark.
I look out on the rose bush I never pruned this summer and spot a single pink blossom, curled under and mournful now, the petals holding tiny flakes. The lawn has disappeared, which is just as well. The flower garden has been reduced to slumping hillocks. I once visited a mansion in Southern California, and I wandered into a room where the furniture had been draped in white sheets. The garden, suspended, reminds me of that.
Let’s go outside, I tell my son, who for once grants that I have come up with an excellent idea. My neighbor already has been outside, shoveling his walk. My son and I stand beneath one of the maples, and I reach up and shake a laden branch. Snow showers over us, coating our hats and coats, finding its way down the back of my neck. My son holds up his arms and dances.
We walk around the block, listening to snow crunching beneath our feet. We follow someone else’s tracks, now filled with fresh powder, nearly disappeared. An early riser.
The world is muffled. It is perhaps this I love the most about the first heavy snow: the hush. It’s as if a pause button has been pushed.
Around Thanksgiving, I think of Rocky columnist Gene Amole. It’s his stuffing recipe. “Here’s to you, Harvey!” But if Amole possesses November, October belongs to Polly Chandler. She was an author who once owned a bookstore in Georgetown. Chandler died in 2005 at 91. It has become a custom of mine at this time of year to pull from my shelves her book “We’ll Be Back Tomorrow . . .”
I never met Chandler, but two years ago, I did meet her daughter- in-law, Joy Chandler. She sent me her mother-in-law’s book, which was written at the kitchen table of the house where we met. It’s a lovely little house with a front porch looking out and up the face of a mountain.
We are fortunate Polly Chandler left behind her writings. They are studies of her beloved mountains, bringing into sharp relief the beauty spread before, but often invisible to, us.
One of my favorite pieces is “October’s Soft Touch.” In it, Chandler writes of searching for a refuge, a place to spend the afternoon picnicking, reading, watching the shadows of the trees stretch across a meadow.
She writes: “A mountain meadow on an autumn afternoon is only a small thing in anyone’s lifetime of thousands of things. But those of us who have come this far along the road know that the ‘small’ things are important, and, too, that it is impossible to gauge what is large and what is small. Many unimportant things become important if the timing is right.”
I haven’t read many paragraphs truer than that one.
Nothing lowers the sky, cuts off the world, forces us to slow, the way a hard snow does. In the city, among those not inclined toward winter sports, the first big snow holds both respite and disruption. The former gives way to the latter soon enough. In the interim is the opportunity for hot chocolate.
Over the last few days, I have not just pulled out my Chandler, but Willa Cather’s “Death Comes for the Archbishop” and Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead.” They have in common the beauty of language, sentences I read and read again simply to dwell in their construction. But I read them for the same reason I walk through the falling snow. They offer stillness, and that is a gift. Not simply because stillness is a counterpoint to tumult. To be still, after all, is not the same thing as to be quiet. Or to be without motion. Stillness is, rather, to listen and watch for that which is pushed out by daily noise. It is a form of prayer, a giving of glory, an act of appreciation as much as it is reflection.
The snow piles in narrow ledges along the top of the backyard fence. It clings to the aspen in the backyard, forcing the uppermost branches down into a reluctant bow. I look past the indoor planter of pink and white flowers I have not yet managed to kill and the windowsill holding a purple vase, which I finally notice holds no water, thus explaining the sad state of the basil within.
I hold the wilted bunch to my nose and find it still fragrant, a small but defiant bundle of summer.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
