The most beautiful kind of snow is subtle. It caresses the eyelash and melts against the lip. It lightly tingles but does not settle. It whispers past trees, cars, and deserted promenades, overlaying its gargantuan arrival against the immovability of its surroundings so that everything, still or stirring, seemed at once strung together by the synchronised twirling of its feathers.
I am describing the snow of last night. When I biked over to Boston Commons in an attempt to find refuge against all the noise of a new semester at Harvard, the snow was subtle. A light dusting had accumulated on my fleece during my journey along the Charles, shaken off only briefly when I stopped to speak with an ice fisherman several metres out from the bank. Despite a film of melted water where the snow was thin, most of the ice was solid. The hole was a third of a metre wide, perfectly round and undoubtedly not the work of his own hands but that of some external machinery, of which there were plenty scattered around. A multimeter-like apparatus was placed in front of his pole, where flecks of light flashed around its ring-like display. A fish sensor, he said. Of course. In this area around MIT, there's a measure for anything, and anything can be a measure for anything else. I was told the sensor operated on sonar. And I thought if each speck of light were a fish, then there must have been a lot of them, because the screen was flickering all the time. And just then the line jumped, the reel spun, and a poor silvery chap came leaping out of the gelid currents. The fisherman removed the hook and tossed it back in.
By the time I got to Tatte I was very tired of talking to people. A complete lack of noise, like most things, is something you tend to miss in retrospect. But I was intent on enjoying it then. I ordered a black coffee and opened my laptop. It was still snowing outside. And inevitably I thought about chasing snow.
Snow is a weird thing to chase. It falls gently before my face, and I want to catch the pristine powder before it makes contact with the ground. But when I reach out for it with my fingers, the inevitable motion stirs up a current and whisks it away. In fact, I think surely snow herself must be frustrated at this game of cat and mouse. She yearns to land, but must brace countless detours as she avoids contact with the moving things below. So I'm left tumbling around. Oftentimes I'm searching for something I can't see, catching a glimpse of a snowflake just to lose it to the wind. But it's important to be out there when it's snowing, so that there are eyes to witness the serenity that descends upon the land under her watch, before the onset of ice and muck. Unfortunately, it's also a matter of personal importance. Growing up in the subtropics of Hong Kong, I'd often dream about an oddly cold winter when fresh snow would blanket the city overnight. But Hong Kong never snows, of course. So subconsciously, I've always tried to settle in places with good snow.
Now I'm in Boston. At some point, I will not be chasing every snowfall anymore, and I mean it. Last time I returned to Quincy completely exhausted. I felt glad to have been out for sure, but it is an undeniable fact that there is nothing more mentally taxing than touching a snowflake without melting it. I am convinced that snow is drawn towards warmth as all things are, but I cannot cup it in my hands without dissolving it or getting my fingers numb. And to be honest, I know this but just didn't care to admit — the snow has chosen to land. If I'm lucky, the spell of cold temperatures might last a few spare days. But eventually there is little to monitoring the weather or hoping for miracles, and much to forget as the snow falls gently outside my window.
I've always been looking for a place with beautiful snow. I guess it's important to realise that snow is not the sole virtue of a place, just as it's important never to forget the kind of snow I'm looking for. So that brings us here, to now, on the sofa of the Qube. I'm watching the snow outside. It is falling in torrents and thickening. It is a bit less subtle than the night before.