Like this morning, looking right out my window across 72nd street to the wall of buildings in front of me (the living room with the lime green walls on the 12th floor, the man who plays the cello every night on the 7th), and it looked just like any other day. Because if you don’t look down to see that snow has settled on the awnings that stretch out to the road, or on the cars that line up and down the streets – then you wouldn’t know.
Snow in the city isn’t the same as it is everywhere else. There’s something you miss because you never seem to have the time to look down, to catch it before it melts away into pools of dirty water that collect in sewers and on street corners and inevitably in front of bus stops, forcing you to stand back when approaching speeding traffic passes.
And then the bus made it to the end of the street, took its usual left onto 5th Ave and there it was, the first time this year I saw Central Park in the snow. Yeah, sure, it snowed here last week for about fifteen minutes around 10AM, at which point all of my friends bombarded me with emails, (knowing how much I love the snow) telling me, “it’s finally here!” and yesterday afternoon, but of course I work in a huge building, and I’m not important enough yet to have an office with windows, and like most things in my life that are plagued by bad timing - I missed it.
But this morning there it was, the way snow is supposed to be, covering the grass, allowing you to look into the distance and see nothing but white resting on branches, making the park its own little place of quiet peace in the middle of an otherwise turbulent and crazy world.
So I can’t wait for tomorrow, when I’ll have the whole day to walk around the park and go back in time to when snow actually meant something – a day off of school, building snowmen without corncob pipes because no one really knows what those are anyway, and feeling like a kid again.
But knowing my luck, by tomorrow, it will all have melted.
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