If something is frozen we say it’s unchanging – that it stays.
When the air freezes, and the frost seeps from the ground into the cracks of my shoes, pooling under the laces and creeping into the eyelets, I feel the cold press into my skin. It tells me to look up and when I do, I see the sky as a source, not an abyss.
The first few flakes carried by the wind remind me of specks of summer pollen that once shook free from leaf-coated trees. These trees are nothing but sticks now – jagged etchings of wood in stark contrast to the sky.
The sun is blinding without warmth. Once, its rays could dissolve the fog that gathers under the trees but this time of year it’s powerless. It strikes the mist for a few hours before admitting defeat, abandoning the afternoon. In this early darkness, the snow comes out from hiding. The sky opens and unleashes a silent storm.
I try to catch the snowflakes and hold them up to my eyes. Up close, they seem impossibly fragile. It only takes a little warmth or water to make one disappear, but together they have the power to erase.
In the night they take on this task, starting with the coldest rooftops and the driest patches of pavement. When one finds a spot it welcomes the others to join, and in the golden circles cast by streetlamps I can see them cling to each other until their cold embrace coats the street.
The street is a living reminder of our habit to disfigure the places we’ve been. Takeaway cups tossed as trash fall limply on the ground and are forgotten. Vomit leaves stains on the pavement, rivalling the works of Pollock. If I’m lucky the smell hits me before the rubber sole of my shoe stamps its signature on a grotesque masterpiece.
These are the marks that a thousand snowflakes have the power to erase. Under a white blanket, the reminders of our laziness and suffering disappear. Quietly, the flakes fall and drown our mistakes.
They erase noise, too. The flurry dampens the shouts of sports fans spilling out of cracks in the walls of a pub, and the steps of workers walking home in the storm fall silent.
But the thing about the frozen silence is that it doesn’t stay. The sun always comes back, and I know when it does, that the clean slate of the night before will disappear. That’s the tragic irony of snow. I know it’s temporary, but I still can’t help but look out at this white world, no longer disfigured by us, and feel some comfort.