Snow Day

I have a collection of Räuchermännchen, “smoking men,” from the Erzgebirge region in southeastern Germany. An apiarist, a photographer, a mushroom forager, a woodsman, a woodworker–each is handmade of various types and tones of wood and intricately detailed with a cavernous body that detaches from his legs so that a lit incense cone can be left in the hollowed out space. Each holds a pipe in his hand or his mouth, and the aromatic smoke is vented through a mouth hole. Each has been given a German name.

On a recent visit with family, my seven year old nephew wanted to see each smoking man in action. We lined them up on my dresser and carefully transferred a lit cone from one belly to the next. He was delighted. I, who have been long delighted by these kitschy little figurines, was delighted by his delight. 

The skier was the last to be lit. “His name is Fritz!” I said to Jacob, who giggled and grinned. Fritz is my father-in-law’s name, Jacob’s Grandpa–a man who loves to ski, a man who loves to be delighted (a trait that flows happily sing-songing its way through the family). His namesake Rächermann even resembles him a bit, with dark shaggy hair peeking out from under a fleece cap with earflaps.

Fritz, our Räuchermann from the Erzgebirge, calling in the snow.

My husband chimed in, “We light Fritz when we want it to snow, like the night before we’re going to go skiing, or when it’s cold enough to snow down here at sea level.” Jacob loved the idea that this little round bellied skier might actually summon powdery flakes from the ever-brooding northwest winter skies.  

Western Washington sat at the periphery of the path of the recent polar vortex. With air temps hovering around and just above freezing and the returning precipitation after a dry January, the forecast changed every ten minutes from rain to snow and back again. 

I am not a superstitious person, but I love the rituals of superstition. We lit Fritz. We crossed our fingers. Our minisplit couldn’t quite get our house warm in the colder than usual temps, and we kept the woodstove cranking. 

And then one morning last week we woke up to a world transformed by a thin but continuous blanket of sparkling snow.

Our world transformed by snow.

The snow

began here

this morning and all day

continued, its white

rhetoric everywhere

calling us back to why, how,

whence such beauty and what

the meaning…

So begins Mary Oliver’s First Snow, and with these same questions we headed out–the dog in her thick winter parka–at first light. 

I am lucky to live in a beautiful place. Even in the rain, even under the enduring gray felt of winter skies, there is a vibrancy to the evergreen forests of Washington that defies the connections we make between this season and death. I wouldn’t trade this verdure for anything, but I love a snowstorm as much as the next kid. I can count the number of blanketing snows we’ve had in my ten years living on Puget Sound on one hand. 

As such, I refuse to treat a snow day as any other day. It strikes me as the worst kind of hubris to behave as if a natural phenomena of such rarity and beauty should be unceremoniously plowed through. That there is any such thing as business as usual in such an unusual moment feels to me like a failure on the part of humanity. And still there were things that had to be done urgently (in the maddening way that everything is urgent these days). But we took a lingering two hour walk nonetheless.

Snow on the licorice fern on the maple’s limb.

In the open places the snow lay two inches deep. The trees were flocked and heavy with it. The sky above them glowed pink. Under their canopies it barely dusted the ground. We crossed paths with a cross country skier in Gazzam Lake. Based on the trail coverage she was doing more tromping than gliding, but a smile was plastered across her face nonetheless. “I had to try!” She was a little sheepish but clearly enjoying herself. 

Wet snow clung to the licorice fern dripping from the maple’s thick limbs, and to the carpets of moss hugging its trunks. It gathered on the bright red of the rosehips and on the furring fleece of the cattails. We weren’t alone in our delight: the redwing blackbirds were riotous in their celebrations of it. They sang and sang, their trills carrying clearly through the air with little else to compete with them. 

Mary Oliver’s poem concludes:

and though the questions

that have assailed us all day

remain—not a single

answer has been found—

walking out now

into the silence and the light

under the trees,

and through the fields,

feels like one.

An answer, at the very least, to the question: What should we do on a snow day?

The cattail marsh in snow.