Learning to walk in the snow requires practice.
It’s not difficult, really, but it does take some diligence.
You have to plant your boot just so to avoid slipping or turning an ankle or tumbling into a drift.
It wouldn’t necessarily hurt too much if you fell, of course. Snow is forgiving. But there’s also not much to support you on your way back up.
I have been walking in the snow since I could walk anywhere, so my footfalls are solid and sure.
I can remember trudging through crisp-crusted drifts in Whitehorse and then Edmonton when I was younger, on my way to school or the rink or Shelley’s house or the Red Rooster store on the corner.
I can close my eyes and see the way it sparkles under the streetlights at midnight, and hear the soft, squeak-trudge noise of boots packing it down with each step.
There are a million textures and seasons of snow, from the slushy Spring surprise storms to the early-January ice-flecked winds that bite at your cheeks and make your eyelashes frost shut.
I know snow, really.
And I know how to work my way through it, up to my knees.
But this snow is something else.
This storm that came into my life and covered everything with a blanket of cold, immutable heaviness.
I went to bed one night and the world was warm and dry and normal and there were horns honking and voices on the street and cars hissing by on the pavement.
And when I woke the next day, the colours were gone and the temperature had dropped and the babel sounds had been muted by crystalline, deafening silence.
I know it didn’t really happen overnight, but the millions of factors and events and genes and experiences and choices that led me here seem like they shouldn’t have amounted to this.
How many damn snowflakes does it take to cover the world, anyway?
I didn’t want this. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t see it coming.
And I know nothing has really changed below the surface, below the blizzard-weight.
Then again, I don’t know how long my world is planning to stay this way. How do you gauge a season you’ve never lived through?
So I can’t promise that things won’t eventually freeze away to nothing.
No matter how hard I dig, though, I can’t get down there to make sure everything is still alive.
This is what I have now.
This is the chill that sets in my belly and the wind that twists my hair into knots and the bleached-out world I see when I open my eyes.
Sometimes it feels cold and sometimes it feels numb. And sometimes it feels so numb that I have to pinch myself to bring the blood back to my skin and remind myself I’m still alive.
I can still see beauty in the landscape.
I can still see lights in the distance.
I can still see things sparkling.
And I am learning how to stay upright, how to put my feet down with confidence, how to trust the ground to hold me up.
But I don’t even know where I’m headed half the time, and when I look back, the wind has stolen my tracks.
Have you ever tried to explain snow to someone who hasn’t seen or experienced it?
Have you ever tried to explain how it accumulates and builds on everything it touches?
Have you ever tried to explain what it means to feel cold to the marrow of your bones and to know that you have to create your own warmth because there is no shelter in sight?
Tuck your chin down.
Arms crossed over your chest.
Hands tucked under your arms.
And keep moving.
Because it’s standing still that kills you in the end.
