Winter Wonder(land) [annie o]

The following are excerpts from a larger piece on my relationship with winter.

Early 1990s

I sit straddling a giant snow ball, which has obliged my imagination and is now actually a giant caterpillar, upon whose back I ride through the air in a never ending story of my own.

Since it is dark out I think it is very late. I think it might be nine o'clock.


November 19, 1996

We are lining up for hot lunch and the power goes out. Everyone talks about it, but no one changes their plans because the power will come back on soon. It always does.

After lunch I go to Challenge group in a room with a skylight. Out of habit, my math teacher puts a slide on the overhead projector and flips the switch. We are confused for a moment when it does not turn on.

After school Christine tells me she got to come home early; there were not enough windows at the high school so they had to send everyone home.

We want to watch the news to see what is wrong, but the TV won't turn on.

My father, coming home from work, knows it is an ice storm and everyone is out of power. We will be out of power for a long time, so he has bought logs at the grocery store and we use our fire place for the first time. We huddle in the living room around a battery powered radio near the fire.

It is dark and cold outside. It is dark and cold inside, too. The house, yard, world has been encased in ice and everything, everyone is freezing. The world outside is a giant, interactive Ansel Adams photograph. Delicate crystals of ice cover every surface like lace: the trees are dressed up for a wedding or a first communion. A few trees cannot bear the weight of ice and snow and fall aimlessly on power lines and homes.

We play board games at the neighbor’s house to occupy our long dark hours. Playing Life, someone lands on a square I have never noticed before: Tree falls on house, Pay $15,000 if not insured. We laugh darkly, remembering the white evergreens in our own yards.

That night we sleep in REI sleeping bags inside our house. We shiver through the night. The next night we contemplate sleeping at my Dad's office, where the power has already been restored and there is heat. Once we begin to pack our sleeping bags, the lights come on.

Everyone is excited, but I am secretly disappointed that the adventure is over already.

My siblings tell of their friends who live farther out in the country, whose power is still out even until Thanksgiving. My siblings are glad to eat a hot turkey when the day comes. In my mind the power is still out and I must learn slowly to live by candlelight and batteries. But when we sit down for dinner I am glad for turkey as well.


December 19, 1998

The thermometer outside reads six degrees Fahrenheit. Instead of canceling our plans, my family and I pull on long underwear, wool socks, extra shirts, thick ski coats and small black gloves so we can walk our skis and ski boots to the car. We bring an extra layer of gloves, hats, fleece neck- and ear-warmers, and ski goggles.

We drive north. We drive up a mountain. We listen to the radio broadcasting the House of Representatives, who have just voted to impeach President Clinton. I am shivering in the back seat.

The mountain is empty except for ski lift operators. It is colder than it was back home. We buy lift tickets and are first and last in line to get on. I pull my goggles over my eyes and my neck-warmer over my nose. At the top of the lift, my family gathers looking down the hill.

We are too cold to notice that from the top of the mountain, on a perfectly crisp clear day that is too cold for snow, all the mountains surrounding us are glistening in the sun, shining pristine white, black-green pines showing their year round color for miles. We don't notice that the world is upside down, and we are among the clouds over the bright blue ocean of sky above. Instead we feel each breath sharply stinging our throats, so we point our skis down the hill and race back to the lodge. We sit in the lodge for an hour, where we thaw and discuss whether or not to go home.

We get on the chair lift again and ride through painful slices of cold air. At the top, my parents urge us not to wait for them: Go to the lodge. We are huddled over and speaking into fleece, struggling to understand that my father's glasses fogged up under his goggles, and the fog has frozen over. He bravely bares his face to the weather; my mother bares her hand with fingernails to scrape the ice. And the way the wind beats them, and they huddle and hide, we might be on Everest.

My siblings and I slice through snow toward the lodge. I keep my skis parallel the whole run: I don't slalom, I don't snow plow, I don't slow down for anything. I artfully dodge trees and sisters and moguls and powder, and with Olympian speed and grace find myself nearing the lodge. I have never skied like this before. I will never ski like this again.

We spend another hour in the lodge thawing. I mention that I'm hungry and my mother reminds me of the granola bar she gave me to put in my pocket. I pull it out and remove it from its silver wrapper that claims it is a chewy granola bar. It is too hard to bite. Frozen like me.

Perhaps the air is too thin to think clearly, or the coldness has slowed our synapses, but we make one more run today. One more gloriously cold, skis-straight-down-the-mountain, faster than fast run. It is the last run of the day, but we must thaw in the lodge again before traipsing all the way to the car.


December 25, Early 2000s

We sit around the tree opening presents. Outside the grass is green, but I am still dreaming of a white Christmas.

We sit among crumpled wrapping paper, ribbons, and boxes, and eat cinnamon rolls for lunch in our pajamas when the snowflakes begin to fall.


December 2004

It is my first finals week in college. It is midnight and I have a test at 8 am tomorrow, for which I am almost ready.

Someone walking by my dorm room declares that the northern lights are outside; a rarity this far south. I drop my books and notes and grab my ski coat. I venture outside into a clearing in the woods behind my dorm. What little snow there was has melted, except where it was scraped into piles along the parking lots and roads. I lay on a friend's blanket she has laid out on a muddy patch, watching the white lights flickering and dancing like fire across the black sky.

After an hour everyone else has gone inside, complaining of the cold. I am under the spell--Abracadabra, Aurora Borealis--and I stay.