This article was originally published in the April 2024 print edition.
Recently, I forced my girlfriend through the ordeal that any number of my friends, partners and casual acquaintances have been subjected to in the past — a showing of the 1982 classic “The Snowman.” Based on a picture book of the same name, “The Snowman” is a hand-illustrated silent short film accompanied by an original symphonic score. All aspects which my willing or unwilling viewers have no doubt found riveting. Not to mention that it inflicts more emotional damage than any children’s Christmas movie has a right to. Call it my artistic appreciation (or early onset depression) but its bittersweet mood is one of the many reasons it was my favorite film as a child. To this day, I believe “The Snowman” stands out as one of the best pieces of media of all time. As an added bonus, it’s readily available in various pirated forms on YouTube. Not that I’m plugging media piracy (I am), or saying that you should engage with pirated media (you should).
The film examines a child’s experience of a snowfall. This was something that I, as a kid growing up in New Hampshire, knew in my bones. Before the untold adult horrors of shoveling, snow tires and road closings, a snowfall was a magical thing. It was something to be wished for in the heat of summer. On hot days, my brother and I used to sequester ourselves in the coolness of the basement, close our eyes, and bring winter to life. We would describe to each other the sight of our backyard covered in a heavy snowfall, imagining the ache of the cold air in the back of our throats, until we both stood shivering together in our imaginary winter wonderland.
A snowfall was something to be longed for, and to be lived. When we were younger, that meant tramping through the woods to the great fort created by brambles covered in a thick warming blanket of snow. When we crawled inside the light was heavy, dark and tinged with red. It meant rolling snowmen, snow-caterpillars and, when we were older, snow-women with rather pronounced assets in front and back. For my family, it meant nordic skiing atop the snow-covered sidewalks when the roads were unreliable and we had places to be, and rows of mittens, hats and upturned boots lining the heaters and windowsills. When I imagine my childhood today, everything, both the sweet and the bitter, lies amid snowdrifts and under crusts of ice.
As I got older, I liked to think that I never completely lost this sense of wonder. I still stopped to study the delicate flakes that caught on my jacket sleeves after I had come inside, watching their intricate shards melt away into droplets of icy water. I took advantage of every blizzard to tack up my pony and go for a ride in the snowy woods. There remained traces of magic in the snowy crust on his mane and the driving sting of ice on my face at a full gallop.
And Smith, when I first came here, had a winter magic of its own: waking up to a quad covered in snow, where later someone will inevitably tramp a phallus onto the blank white canvas; ice skating, boot-sliding or falling on your face on a frozen Paradise Pond; helping the old lesbians on West Street shovel their driveway.
So what does it mean to come through a Smith College winter without snow? And no, faint dustings and inconsequential sleet don’t count. I mean a real snow, one that lasts long enough for you to get sick of it. A winter without hardship, in which your feet never get numb and your heavy coat stays at the back of your closet, births an underwhelming spring. The daffodils and magnolias this year were dull and colorless without the brilliant backdrop of snow to precede them. In years like this, when the seasons blur into each other without distinction or care, I feel the loss not just of the magic of snow, but the great New England relief of knowing that there is always something to look forward to. That when the air is icy it will be warm again, and vice versa. It’s the eternal promise that drives New Englanders to keep moving forward. Coming out of a winter without snow, I couldn’t help but feel as though I had lost something essential, moved farther away from that childhood wonder of “The Snowman” and one step closer to the dreary, inevitably indistinct existence of adulthood.
But, as so often happens when we give into self-pity, the universe threw me a bone to stop my griping. Thus came the April snowfall. There was a certain sadness with which I watched the magnolia blossoms brown and die, cocooned in ice, and the tender new buds freeze before they even got a chance. But they were a worthy sacrifice for the chance to walk sidewalks white and crisp, to again see Smith blanketed in drifts.
There was something terrible, however, in the warm prickle of the spring sun and the way it made the hillsides shimmer. Something about it made me want to stuff my coat pockets with snow. For as much as “The Snowman” is about the wonderful magic of childhood, it is also about the inevitable impermanence of it all. And as the spring snow melted and the ground retreated back into mud and dirt and grass, I felt the time passing me by. Even now, I can feel it pulling me endlessly further and further away from the snow-capped hills of my childhood, when snowmen could fly and winter lasted forever.
