Snow

Yesterday was a foretaste, a little powdery white film on the ground, with the rotten leaves and the still green grass poking through, but tonight is the real deal, it’s been coming down in thick, fat flakes for the last couple of hours and there is a picture postcard blanket of white over all the ground and all the cars, and decorating the branches of trees like they suddenly grew muscles.

I’m not, for the most part, a big fan of snow.  It’s pretty, at exceptional moments.  Like now, like one particularly still morning

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

in the winter of 98-99 walking in that really big forest in Prague 4, you step out of the metro at I forget the name of the stop but it’s after Kacerov and before Chodov and walk straight into the woods and before you know it you are submerged and the city is as far away as the surface of the ocean to a fish and snow lay on everything and there was a latticework of ice between the tangled, barren twigs and it was magical, like one evening when I was just leaving a poetry reading in Letna Park and the frantic rapper guy who was leaving Prague turned me onto a big fat joint as I was leaving and I walked across the park with the moon on the snow and the golden lights of the city across the river, and I felt, not for the first time, that living in Prague is as close as a human being can possibly come to living in heaven on earth.

Everybody remembers a few significant snowfalls in their life.  A few classic snowball fights, a few painful falls on the ice, your best snowman.

I will always remember the date of the first snowfall in 2002.  It was December 15th.  The way I remember, my wife was about 2 or 3 weeks past her due date.  She remembers it was a couple of days, a week, tops.  Anyway, she calmly announces while we’re watching TV that she needs to go to the hospital.  While I’m panicking and running around screaming questions, she called the ambulance, took a shower, got dressed, put on make up and got her hospital bag ready.

Then the ambulance came.  I wanted to go along with her, but that was somehow against regulations.  So, I watched the ambulance drive away and turned and walked toward the tram, to make my own way to the hospital, and the flakes were starting to fall.  Sam was born the next day and when we brought him home from the hospital there was still a thick snow on the ground.