Photo courtesy of http://www.visualizeus.com
It’s fun. It’s powdery. It makes you feel amazing. It puts you in the mood to stay up all night and have endless conversations with friends. Sometimes it even makes you want to get up, dim the lights and sway your body to Bryan Ferry’s Slave to Love, or Billy Idol’s Eyes Without Face. Yeah, Snow will do that to you.
Outside, Brooklyn sleeps cozy under a blanket of white. Flecks of snow bounce off the red and green stoplights on the boulevard. Our block is lined with the diffused glow of streetlights; squint hard enough and it looks like a parade of fireflies. On every street parked cars lay dormant under mountains of snow. The wind blows west, then east, then changes direction again, carrying bits of ice back toward the sky and up past the rooftops of the borough’s brownstones and graystones. It isn’t even that cold.
Inside apartment 4R on 5th Street, we’re sober and we spy the world below from our second story window, mesmerized. Today we remember the world as children and find ourselves living inside a snow-globe. We are timid about our snow day—lazy. If Old Man Winter were to peel back the roof of our apartment, he’d find us melted into sofas, sitting cross-legged on red Persian rugs, smushed into pillows and bundled up in blankets. He’d find the room littered with books and art projects.
In our living room, on the coffee table, the bottom of a bottle of India ink leaves a smudge on the edge of some drawing paper, an eraser rests next to a compass whose needle points to a charcoal pencil; half empty glasses of ginger ale sit clustered in a tribe. At the edge of the table, bags of candy spill over. Dirty dishes crowd the sink and the place is a mess. But today’s no day for cleaning. A blizzard has hit New York and after finally shaking the lazy off ourselves, we’ve just come in from playing in it.
“Pass the animal crackers Hil.” I say. We’ve surrounded ourselves with junk food. No one feels like cooking.
“I want some of those Doritos.” Brian says grabbing for the bag near the sofa.
“I’m so glad you guys like the music I downloaded” Matt says as we munch on junk and sing along to Culture Club and Cheap Trick.
Hilary’s been waiting all day to hear Columbia send out the official notice that a snow day has been declared and when she receives word she yells out “Workshop’s been cancelled!” A day off from the establishment, that’s the best thing about a snow day.
The radiator begins to hiss, the apartment warms, Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors begins to play on the stereo and we all find ourselves lulled back to an era when the world was something we rarely worried about. We were just babies then. Some of us were seven or eight. Struggling, working hard for paper, recession: these things meant nothing to us then, they were concepts that floated right over our heads when the adults raised their voices or spoke in hushed whispers.
We have yet to open the Pringles or the Reese’s Pieces from Matt and Hil’s snowy sojourn to the corner Rite Aid. But we will. Tonight, as the storm passes by our window and we stare in wonder, we have only the appetites of children.
Tomorrow, when the sun rises, things will melt and the streets will get really slushy and the world will get all murky and dirty again. Fucking Snow.
MUrwarid - this is so so so so so good!!!