Watching snow fall
The first winter I was in Idaho, I was fond of asking, “What does snow do?”
It’s like being in a snow globe, I actually said. I think I was mocking, but maybe I wasn’t. I was young. Impossibly young. I had just turned 22 and started my MFA program, teaching English 101 to other children about my age. I was wild and deeply wounded. I walked around with my blue painted nails, chewing gum loudly, raw wounds exposed, talking casually and endlessly about all my various traumas.
There was a reading once, I think of just professors, and it was one of the professors’ birthdays, I’m sure.
It’s your birthday? I remember shouting. We have to do Irish car bombs, I said, and I ordered several, and made us drink them up.
Later that night we poured out of someone’s car and walked to my apartment. It’s possible I slipped on the snow, which was something I did a lot back then.
What does snow do, I asked him, my charming little line, while we sat on my couch, drinking something that I had on hand. Maybe it was wine?
When I think of this man, who had two children then, going back to his house, where he packed lunches for the kids, or signed off on their weekly checklists, folded their clothes, planned their meals, made sure they had snacks and water bottles and took them to the dentist and the doctor, specialists when referred. Or at least his wife did these things, right?
There was so much he knew that I didn’t know.
But also, so much I knew that he didn’t, too.
When I recall Idaho, I think back on that whole state with rose colored glasses. That whole time period. Grad school.
There was hardly a snow day declared in Idaho, ever, but my second year in graduate school, we had my first snow day ever (none in Tucson, where I grew up).
My first husband and I were just dating back then.
I was antsy. I was often antsy back then.
I am still antsy, often, now.
On this snow day, though, he and I decided to take a drive. A whole day off, I remember thinking. I’m not sure why I thought this was a special treat, as we had a whole summer off and our entire job was to read and write, and for a very few hours teach, and the expectations of our teaching were quite low.
But this day, I felt strongly: Let’s go do something.
We drove to a nearby skiing mountain and rode the lift to the top.
I drank a Hefeweizen, or maybe a Pilsner, at the top.
I think I had two. Maybe Loren had one.
What mountain was it, I try to remember. Loren might remember. I don’t think it was Schweitzer, because that was the mountain where he and his first wife were married, and I think I would remember that detail.
We couldn’t have gone all the way to Montana, could we?
My second husband (the one I’m married to now), was stationed in Montana in the Air Force around that time. He remembers a Halloween with his ex-wife, when they were young and childless and carved pumpkins. He recalls a picture of them at that time.
I suppose we were happy then, he says. But nostalgia is a lie.
There had to have been some good times, I say. I mean, it was over ten years. I would hope there were some good times.
There were, he says. But then I can keep remembering.
It’s possible that when Loren and I went on that drive, that we hadn’t left the house in some time. This was a dark Idaho winter, and times were tough, and we were sometimes very sad. I drank homebrew wine out of a giant carboy that his roommate had made.
Was I living in that apartment, yet? I can’t recall.
The first time I looked out the bay window at our first house, I knew I would look out the window while holding a baby and watch snow fall.
We had just had dinner with our realtor, and he’d drank a few of these high gravity beers. So had I. Loren had something, I’m sure.
There was an air of excitement, of mischief. We were all tipsy. Like maybe we had broken into the house, even though we hadn’t.
The house was a 1969 split level that had never been renovated. There was flower printed linoleum in the downstairs bathroom, mustard and ochre and orange pedals.
This was 2014 in Spokane, and I loved this house. We closed in October so it must have been early fall.
That realtor had a little girl, I remember, and later divorced his wife. I didn’t get the details. He was pretty hard drinking, as I recall.
It seemed like everyone in Spokane was. At least everyone I knew.
They have to come home before snow falls, I said when the twins were in the NICU.
But I watched out that hospital window, when snow fell, my boys still hooked to wires and machines.
They came home not long after that, a total of 40 days in the NICU, October 1 - November 9, in the NICU.
And I did hold them on my hip, and looked out that bay window, and watched snow fall.
Loren and I were in Appomattox when snow fell the first winter we lived in North Carolina.
This was our first overnight away from the baby (our third) since he had been born.
I had brought with us our copies of the Seven Principles of Making Marriage Work by John Gottman, but we didn’t really read it.
The Seven Principles is the book that my second husband and I had both filled out questionnaires and our ex-spouses had not.
Not so far across the state, actually, my second husband was wanting to leave his wife, but was also many kids in, and trying to get this book to work for them, too.
But we couldn’t have even fathomed each other back then. Couldn’t have fathomed that this book wouldn’t have saved our separate marriages, really.
I had rented a cabin that I had found on Air B&B that had described itself as rustic, but as it turned out, it didn’t even have running water. A little too rustic, I apologized, this little cabin. But it was nice to be away.
Snow was predicted back in North Carolina, but we didn’t really think it would happen, not on just the two nights we’d be away. And then it did.
Grammy sent pictures of the boys in the snow.
I texted her where I thought their snow gear was.
We were not so long removed from the Northwest then, and all the snow gear I had for the boys still fit them.
“Baby,” my husband Billy says, ten days before we see snow fall together. “I don’t want you to get too excited,” he says, looking at his phone, “but there is snow in the forecast.”
I do love snow, but he is most certainly talking to himself about not getting too excited.
“I want to have a nice snow with you,” he says.
His last snow was ruined, he says, with his ex-wife. He had played all day with the kids in the snow, and then his oldest had become worried about frostbite. You don’t have frostbite, my husband assured his son, who was probably ten at the time. This is because of your anxiety that he’s freaking out like this, his wife had said. Something like that, anyway.
The five little boys are already in bed when the snow started falling.
“Look at the size of the flakes!” Billy shouts. “Look!”
The two oldest kids are upstairs being loud, shouting that snow is falling.
“Do not wake the little boys up,” my husband calls up. “Quiet down!”
The baby is wearing a leopard print sleeper. We had her in her walker, where we have been putting Cheerios and puffs in front of her. Her snack tray, we call it.
We watch out the window. The flakes are starting to come down.
“Let’s kiss in the snow,” my husband says.
He grabs me in the kitchen, starts dancing. He sings. He says when I get so mad he just wants to hold me, and make it better, but I flail away, pissed.
“This is what I’m supposed to teach you,” he says, running the back of his fingers along my cheek. “To slow down.”
He has Vince Gill on the Alexa.
Our baby puts her palm on the window, watching snow accumulate for the first time in her life.
“Look, Abigail,” we say. “Look at the snow falling.”
What does snow do, she asks, pawing the window.
In my defense, I grew up in Texas, so snow was rare. I do get pretty excited though 😆. Great post as always!