Snow, Mary

I was puttering around the apartment this morning before work, paying attention only to plans and intentions, when I happened to turn toward the window. "Oh, it's snowing!" I said, in a tone of voice that wouldn't have been inappropriate for a five-year-old.
I've been at work in the grimmest and least spontaneous of offices and heard other grown-ups pipe up at the sight of snowflakes as they never had at any other occurrence. The word "pretty" is as likely to be uttered by taciturn machos as dedicated femmes.
Why this pure, this unadulterated, reaction to snow?
It certainly is a childhood thing. The parent's conveyance of excitement before a snow is a lesson in how to welcome something good from the world. The child has likely heard the word "pretty" applied to a birdy or a flower, but never before to anything as kinetic, as sensory, as enfolding as a snowfall.
A snowfall shows the air. Instead of an imperceptible something, the air is fluttering, depthy, stinging. Instead of the nothing of still air or the constancy of wind it invites the eye to move, here and near and far and near again. How bad can a falling be if it seems endlessly renewed?
In the vertical city, what your eye sees is flattened by habit and facade. You lose the opportunity to focus far. If there's not much in the way of trees around, you don't have the chance to follow motion, to look into depth.
A snowfall plumps the atmosphere, flirts with the eye, capers between you and the usual. It inverts the world, turning the ground brighter than the sky. It can't be bought or financed, canceled or rescheduled. Yay!
As long as you don't have to shovel it, snow is a pure pleasure for the city dweller. For a day or two if you're lucky. If any remains after that, the filth that accumulates on it is made even more vile by the reminding shine beneath. It's enough to make you growl and grow older.

[Note: The "Yay!" above is dedicated to Mary Susan Herczog.]