Even After Snow Melts to Slush, Its Magic Lingers

My fascination with snow goes back many years, even though I saw real snow for the first time only a few years ago, when I was 28.

My first notion of snow was as a child in Colombia when we received a card from a friend who lived in the northern United States. The card showed a classic winter landscape with naked trees and a small village with snow-capped roofs.

I asked my mother why everything was white, and she responded that it was because of the snow. She explained to me what snow is but didn’t sound quite convincing, because, I suspect, she had never seen snow either. She said, “Snow is like a rain of little ice drops.” This concept impressed me so deeply that I have held on to it ever since.

Many years later, my oldest brother and his family, who had emigrated from Colombia to the United Sates, sent pictures of his children playing with snowballs and making a snowman as tall as themselves. Their snowman was wearing a red plaid scarf and had a carrot nose and eyes of coal. My nephews and nieces were posing around this magic character. I thought a snowman was the most exciting thing kids could make.

Meanwhile, I continued dreaming of snow, inspired by this obsession and by a sense of inferiority, because of our lack of seasons in the tropics. There, we call summer the sunny period of the year and winter the rainy months.

We revealed our fascination with seasons in Christmas decorations of fake snow. Decorating the Christmas tree was a major tradition in my family’s home. The event included a trip to the countryside to find a beautiful tree.

We didn’t have tall green aromatic pines. Instead we would take a small fruit tree, strip off all the leaves, paint it and glue artificial snow to the branches. We all participated in the fantasy that winter had come and that we were having a “white Christmas.” It took until about the middle of April to rid the house of the artificial snow scraps that stuck to everything during the brief holidays.

Four years ago, I moved to New York in the middle of a very intense winter storm.

The first thing I did, after the long trip from South America, was to take pictures of Central Park covered in white. The snow had fallen over Manhattan, and I thought it was magic, one of the longest-awaited experiences of my life--real snow, not glued on the branches of a pathetic fruit tree in the tropics.

The next day, when the snow began to melt and Manhattan was a gigantic swamp, I was a little less excited about snow but, in general, I still found it magic.

I still have a fascination with snow. Recently, I visited friends in the mountains around Virginia City, Nev. To my delight and their displeasure, there was a two-day snowstorm.

While I was staring out the front window for hours, watching the wind-driven snow flying in different directions, my hosts were complaining. For them, snow means work: cleaning the road, shoveling the steps, scraping the car and putting chains in the tires. Sometimes, snow means they get stuck at home listening to the radio news reports and awaiting the opening of the roads.

I enjoyed shoveling the snow from their porch. The snow made my vacation.

While in the tropics we dream of the beauty and variety of four seasons and play fake winter, northern people want to go to the tropics to enjoy the year-round summer, the beach and the palm trees. Sometimes we take for granted what we have.

Recently, when I went back to Colombia, my youngest niece asked me about the snow. I tried to give her a credible and understandable explanation about something that for her, as once for me, seemed to belong to a different world. I ended saying, “It is like a rain of little ice drops,” as it was once explained to me.