When Lucy enters Narnia she finds a world of white. You can imagine as she pushed aside the fur coats in the wardrobe that she’d start to smell that undeniable crisp in the air, something fresh and clear. A gust of wind that makes her shiver, her hand reaches out - snow.
C.S. Lewis immediately marks this strange place, this new place, as magical, by covering Narnia in snow. A single burning lamppost, a warm ember amidst a wood of green and white and grey, promises respite, reprieve, and moments later the charming (and guilty)1 Mr. Tumnus will invite Lucy back for tea and cakes and conversation by the fire.
Narnia may have been blanketed in cold by the icy heart of the White Witch, but the warmth of Mr. And Mrs. Beaver’s kindness, their kitchen piled high with food and drink and good company, glows all the more in comparison. Indeed, the cold offers our heroes opportunities for great fortitude and heroism, trudging out into the icy night to flee the murderous wolf police. And when the snow does finally melt, when the first thaw cracks ice sheets across the river, we are yet again confronted with the inherent magic and danger and majesty of the natural world. Both beautiful and horrifying, strange and familiar, the initial foray into Narnia’s Winter has taught us to long for Spring.
Winter - and snow in particular - invites us to stark extremes. As I walk down to the barn for night check, the temperature plummets - I’m bundled in two coats, gloves, a scarf, a hat - and I see how the world has literally been painted in black and white. A moonlit soaked blanket of snow covers the fields and the fences and the garden beds as the black sky boasts a startling clarity of stars. It is beautiful. And it is cold.2 After giving hot water and extra hay, I hurry back inside, eager for my tea and my covers and my books, shuddering with delight as the icy wind blows against the windows.
“I love the inconvenience the same way that I sneakingly love a bad cold: the irresistible disruption to mundane life, forcing you to stop for a while and step outside your normal habits. I love the visual transformation it brings about, that recolouring of the world into sparkling white, the way that the rules change so that everybody says hello as they pass. I love what it does to the light, the purplish clouds that loom before it descends, and the way it announces itself from behind your curtains in the morning, glowing a diffuse whiteness that can only mean snow. Heading out in a snowstorm to catch the flakes on my gloves, I love the feeling of it fresh underfoot. I am rarely childlike and playful except in snow. It swings me into reverse gear.”
, Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
―
This morning as the baby gleefully crawls around our bedroom occupied by two toothbrushes and a toilet paper roll,3 I turn on a‘reading in a cozy library’ playlist and read snippets of “The Nordic Theory of Everything.”4 I think of these Scandinavian people and their three hours of sunlight and their cold long winters. But really what I think of is candles and how candles are such a great obsession in Nordic culture. In Danish they are called levende lys which means ‘living light’.
I think again of Lucy and that glowing lamppost - and how warm and strange and beautiful it must have looked there in the snow. I think how candles really aren’t very beautiful in summertime - how we need the dark and the cold to see how lovely they are. Candles, like snow, make the world soft and gentle.
"The world changes when it snows. It's quiet. Everything softens."
-Lorelai Gilmore, Gilmore Girls
Like Lorelai Gilmore, television’s most ardent lover of snow, I have many magical snow memories - bundled in snowsuits, hauling sleds to the big hill neighborhoods away (what a thrill of freedom!) - of snow angels and hot coco and a book by the fire while the world swirled with white.
I remember as a teenager, the absolute fiendish delight I’d take an unexpected snow day when I could return to my warm bed and sleep in - of sleepovers and pajamas turned inside out watching the weather channel, hoping for a blizzard.5
And when it snowed before we had scheduled some maternity photos, I made sure the driveway wasn’t too icy and told the photographer to come anyway. In a way, this was perfect. Because it was my first baby and the world felt strange, beautiful. And the snow made it magic.
I still remember one wild day out hunting. We got on the scent of a coyote - a chase that is far faster and more thrilling in many ways than a fox. Coyotes run in straight lines and will take you careening through the countryside at full gallop. So that’s what we did - as the snow came down in droves, and I dodged the icy snowballs being kicked up by galloping horse’s hooves. And then inside to ‘tea’ - which is always much more than tea - it is soup and cookies and homemade chili and an absurd amount of hot port. Ruddy cheeked and sniffling and feeling like we all barely made it back in one piece, my fellow riders and I huddled together and watched the storm blow through. We still couldn’t feel our toes, but we were delighted.
We live in a glass house.6 And it is often very cold. In fact, there are rooms in this house I would need a winter coat if I were to stay in there for long. It is a delightfully impractical midcentury modern house that loves the outdoors. The windows invite in rain and snow and heat and the temperature is impossible to regulate. We have a fireplace and zoned heating and big curtains and a tapestry across a big cracked window pane. We also have our fair share of electric heaters plugged in at night. And the impracticality and the cost of this can sometimes sour me to the cold, but never quite.
Because there is always another sweater or another cup of tea or another blanket. And even though my nose is often very cold, I feel the rawness of this time of year as a sort of invitation - simultaneously a challenge - to cold nights at the barn, numb toes out on a hike with the dogs, trying to bundle a baby in winter clothes - and a respite - look, the lane is too icy,7 it is dark so early, go ahead, stay home, read, rest, sleep.
I have so many adventurous memories dominated by the cold and snow. I’ve skied in Breckenridge and Aspen and even the French Alps.8 I’ve taken snow hikes and watched a blizzard roll in from a rock face in West Virginia. I’ve jumped out of a hot tub to roll in the snow (apparently Swedish people do this? At least that’s what I was told to convince me to do it.). I’ve built snowmen and gone sledding and had snowball fights on the college green.
The world gets less snow now. Even now, here on the East Coast, I have memories of a snowier childhood. They say we’re entering a time of more extremes, more fluctuations. Fifty degrees one day, twenty the next. One winter they’ll be four blizzards. The next year there won’t be any snow at all.
All of this speaks to the fragility I feel lately. Of things not quite knowing where they stand. Or will stand. Of a world that is changing too fast or not changing enough.
But I hope we still have snow. Of course I do.
My toddler runs outside to catch snowflakes on her tongue. She pulls her fox hat over her ears, yelling that she’s a fox running to her burrow. At her Scandinavian inspired Nature School this morning they are not deterred by the icy temperatures, but bundle up the children and put them on sleds. As it should be, I say.
Life is all about the balance of extremes, of the promise of reprieve. I’ve tried to explain this to friends less enthused about the cold - how much of my love of the cold is tied up in my love of blankets and books and a warm fire. How to love these things I need to first be a bit uncomfortable, a bit raw and challenged. How I need to long for something and hope for something again. How the cold asks me to do all these things.
In the midst of heating bills and cars slow to start and broken tractors and too much to do to deal with a snow day, I hope I don’t forget the beauty and hope of winter.
There will always be something magic in waking up to a world of white - how what was yesterday brown and dead and grey is now shining, glimmering, fresh and clean.
What a promise that is.
and COLD! No way was he warm in just that scarf.
real feel in the single digits and below zero all this week.
some second-time-around Mom advice for you: they don’t need toys. Babies/kids are like cats - they’d rather play with the box.
Stay tuned, I have thoughts.
For the record, the best way to recreate this “snow day” feeling as a Mom is to have someone take the kids (ideally unexpectedly) for an hour or two in the morning just after you’ve gotten up. There is no thrill like closing the door to whatever shrieking chaos is happening in favor of another hour or two of warm blankets and sleep.
You’d think I’d throw less stones.
frequently true. Our lane isn’t considered a road by the county and therefore isn’t plowed. Thank goodness for neighbors with big tractors.
Do not recommend. They don’t groom their slopes! Watch out for rocks as you come down.
I love the idea that inconvenience and discomfort creates space for joyful wonder. I too, love a snow day, and here in central Oregon we've had several this year. It is wonder-ful, and it also leads me to remember just how small and fragile I am. When breaking the ice out of my horse's hooves or building a fire with snowy wood to warm our house, it's easy to feel vulnerable, and that is as it should be.
Where I live, in Iceland, there are only about four hours of sunlight in the winter but each of those hours is a magically glistening golden hour. Then after that is a blue twilight where every single light shines a brilliant yellow in contrast!