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In the Forever Snow

In the Forever Snow

Last updated on: January 16, 2025 at 7:52 pm by Mary Pezzulo

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In the Forever Snow 2025-01-16T19:52:45-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

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We’re having a snowy winter.

We haven’t had a snowy winter in at least two years. Last year it only snowed for two weeks, and the year before that was even milder. Instead of a proper freeze, we have been tending towards three whole months of the worst part of February, rain and clouds and fog with no snow. I was afraid we’d never see a proper snow again.

This year, it’s snowed.

We had snow before Christmas, a sloppy thaw at Christmas, then a week of rain and I despaired. But then the rain turned to snow on New Years’ Day, and it hasn’t stopped. All of January has been snow and ice, clouds and quiet. I tried to tell myself that this was a sign that life was getting better and we’d find solutions to all of our misfortune: even as the other side of the country burned. Even as I knew that this was cold wafting down from the Arctic, as the ice caps shrunk.

It’s snowed and stayed frozen for so long, the world feels isolated: as if no place outside of this place really exists, and nothing will ever happen again.

My garden seeds for the year came in the mail. It felt like a missive from a magical world that couldn’t possibly exist. The garden is one long white sheet of snow, with no way to distinguish it from the yard. Surely there isn’t fertile soil under there. Surely you can’t grow crops on a frozen planet like this. Surely the enormous colorful sunflowers I remember from six months ago were a dream.

When I am not puttering in the garden all day, the children don’t come around to inspect my work, so I don’t see them. I only see evidence they’ve been there: sled tracks in the snow on the hill near Jimmy’s house. Snowmen cropping up in a yard, then falling over. Footprints along the route the Artful Dodgers take, when they cut through the alley and my yard to catch the school bus. They always carefully track around the garden that isn’t there right now, turn sharply to the right, and track through the gap between mine and the haunted house, leaving a hieroglyph in the snow that looks like a great big letter L.

The only reason I know that Jimmy’s boy is still living at the house down the street, is that Jimmy still borrows our car to drive Adrienne and his own children to school, then rushes back home in time to put the boy on the Kindergarten bus.

I tried not to know anything more about the Lost Girl’s family, but I found out through the neighborhood gossip pipeline that they were all living in the homeless shelter family apartments, where they could only stay for three months, and that time would be up on January First. Several different families were furious with her because she’d been scamming them for money as she did to me. I will never see her children again, but I can’t stop worrying. It’s so cold.

This morning, when I was scrolling through the properties for sale and daydreaming about being rich, I saw the Artful Dodgers’ house was for sale.

They don’t own their house, of course. Hardly anyone around here does. Whoever bought it in an attempt to make easy money as a landlord must have skipped town, and now it was being auctioned off by whoever was foolish enough to give them a mortgage. The house looks like it’s barely standing up, and the next landlord will have to do some repairs, bring it up to code, put in some of that cold gray flooring and joyless white tile. He’ll raise the rent. The Artful Dodgers don’t have more money for rent. I’d seen them burning their garbage: a sure sign they got the City utilities shut off. If the City shuts off your water, they’ll refuse to collect the garbage as well, leaving it in a rotting heap. Then you have to get rid of it some other way.

I went out to the garden, where it was snowing hard. Flakes the size and color of pear blossoms were darting at my face. The Artful Dodger’s house far down the street was invisible, whited out. The L-shaped hieroglyph of footprints had been filled in by the snowfall, as if it had never been there.

Surely you can’t raise children on a frozen planet like this. Surely the gaggle of noisy children I remember from last summer was a dream.

I went inside to arrange my seeds, and plan that impossible garden.

The snow continued until it blotted out the world.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows an d Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, donate to “The Little Portion” on paypal or Mary Pezzulo on venmo

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