-By John Armor
Whenever there is a decent snow storm at night, as there was in the Blue Ridge this week, the following morning reminds me of a handful of perfect days in my life, fifty years ago in Salisbury, Maryland.
Salisbury was then a very small town. Located on the Eastern Shore, it was halfway between the Atlantic Ocean and the Chesapeake Bay, about 20 miles away from each. As a six year old boy, I had no comprehension of the influence of geography on weather. All I knew was, there was a sled in the front hall that had been there since September, and the snow for that sled fell everywhere except in my home town.
Of course, there was a sound reason for that. The Bay and the Ocean are both heat sinks. They absorb summer heat, and radiate heat in the depths of winter. That’s why the folks in the Midwest freeze in the wintertime, and fry in the summer. They don’t have any heat sinks. But to me, back then, it only meant that there would be at best, two or three snowfalls, and the snow would be mostly gone before the end of the day.
I will always remember the first snow fall I experienced. I woke up that morning, and something was missing. It was like the A.A. Milne poem, “The Knight Whose Armor Didn’t Squeak,” in which Sir Thomas Tom did not hear the squeak of Sir Hugh’s armor. That morning, I did not hear the ordinary sounds of traffic, and people, and animals and birds, in the 200 block of West College Avenue.
I ran to the window and looked out. The world had a blanket of fresh, unmarked snow on it. That blanket was hiding all the sounds. I was listening to the silence of snow, and that was very good news.
In places like Atlanta, when two flakes fall, the City panics, and the schools close. In places like New Haven, the salt trucks and the snow plows roll, and life goes on as usual unless there is a monstrous blizzard. Suffice to say, Salisbury was like Atlanta. The snow guaranteed the schools would be closed. I’d have the day to play on my sled, and some home wet, cold and tired, to dry clothes and a warm meal.
Those were perfect days. There were perhaps six of them.
Children, of course, believe in perfection if they have a decent childhood. Adults, if they’ve been paying attention, know that perfection is not for this world. Still, a new-fallen snow has its benefits here in the mountains.
The day is still announced by the silence of snow. The first question is whether there’s so much snow so we can’t get out the half-mile gravel road to go to town? Beyond that, is the pleasure of the snow.
There were the paw prints of a fox in the yard today; we have both red and grey ones in the surrounding forest. Our flock of wild turkeys showed up this morning to scratch for acorns on the lawn. There are five turkeys now. A week ago, there were eight turkeys. Probably, one of the foxes met one of the turkeys, producing one well-fed fox and one less turkey.
We’ll go down the driveway very slowly today. We’ll inspect the road and the edges of the forest for evidence of others of our forest creatures, the deer, the bobcats, and so on. It is amazing how much activity goes on, every night around us, which is recorded and displayed in the fresh snow.
That sled from Salisbury is still here. It waits on the porch for someone with better knees and physical aptitude, like any of my grandchildren, to be here when the silence of the snow descends.
And then there is the special beauty of the mountains when the snow is hung on the rhododendrons and the oaks and the holly bushes. It is a silent but eloquent reminder that even if the world isn’t perfect, it can be either better or worse. And it’s our duty to strive to make it better.
That’s what this old man, fifty years removed from a boy with a sled in Salisbury, gains from the snow these days.
____________
John Armor is a graduate of Yale, and Maryland Law School, and has 33 years practice at law in the US Supreme Court. Mr. Armor has authored seven books and over 750 articles. Armor happily lives on a mountaintop in the Blue Ridge. He can be reached at: John_Armor@aya.yale.edu
Fair Use: This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my efforts to advance understanding of political, human rights, economic, democracy, and social justice issues, etc. I believe this constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research, educational, or satirical purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site/blog for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.