It would be inaccurate to call today’s snow “the first snow” of the year - we had a small dusting early in November (the 10th, to be exact, which I know because my ongoing compulsion to post album art of what I’m listening to on my Instagram story reports that I last played Give Up on November 10th).
This was more of a “first snow” in the all too familiar Midwesterner sense of the phrase: snow emergency declarations early the previous evening, the school closing ticker broadcasting A Very Good Day for school aged children across all of Central Ohio, and (at least in our house) a debate about the drive in the mess headache vs. the switch to remote work headache. As Rachel weighed her pros and cons the morning news reported like two dozen car accidents. Decision made. Off to work in Ben’s room she went, and off to snooze on the couch to The Snowy Day went me and Ben.
I had planned to grade papers and clean the house today, but I found myself spending it instead with Ben (a far better proposal than “work” this being the actual work that requires me, my actual life’s work). A nap and virtual office hours notwithstanding it was dude and all I day, and the culmination our little snowy day was a trip to the sledding hill in Marysville.
This year Ben’s interest was in sending the slide down the hill without either of us and then walking down to get it. Something to that I should probably write about, but while we were enjoying the beautiful crisp snow and “enjoying” the freezing air, wandering aimlessly around on the nearby trail that follows a now-frozen creek I couldn’t stop myself from thinking “oh I should write a poem about this.”
Imagine my surprise then, a few hours and hot chocolate later, to discover I (1) don’t have a poem in me tonight or (2) don’t have a consolation poem about “The Winter” without going as far back as my “Fall 13” folder from my M.F.A. program days. That’s 2013 for folks joining me in the challenge of simple math. Twelve years between this moment and my last explicitly wintery poem? Seems like an oversight. Stay tuned for that remedy.
Since I had the unshakable urge to write something and share it (task avoiding: still have grading to do) you’ve heard winter poems by Wallace Stevens (“The Snow Man”) and by William Carlos Williams (“Blizzard”). I’ll leave you with something inarguably Midwestern: a poem I wrote 12 years ago while living in San Francisco. It is called “Midwestern”:
Ohio calls my name in snow
ice the roads crawling home
ice the veins run above my bones
by spring the grasses wed my toes
feet to follicle my body owns it
lungs and guts and it all
belonging to more than my body,
harvest flesh like grain or barley.
Drink and dine the stuff
which ever comes
by limb and root and route
home in blood by my heart.
