Snow
Ed. note: This week’s edition of Enthusiasms is late, partially because I spent my Sunday with my good friend and her very cute baby (worth it) but also because I spent a while trying to get to a ~bigger conclusion~ until I realized: Maybe there isn’t one? And that’s okay? In the spirit of More Blogging 2023, perhaps not every thought is fully baked, but what matters is it’s fully posted. Anyways, without further ado: Snow. Thanks for reading, ilu. 💖
I don’t go on Reddit much, or really that widely, but I usually browse r/boston at least once a day. There are a few topics there that reliably do numbers, and it’s the time of year for one in particular: 2015’s snow.
I saw the post entitled “8 years ago today,” and I, of course, remembered. Not the scene in particular but the way it was—everyone bundled up and out in the empty roads. C. and I had only been dating a year. I was still working at the giant, evil online home furnishings e-commerce company. We met up for dinner as the snow started and just so happened to catch the last Orange Line out of the city, going to my apartment in Jamaica Plain. What would we have done if we’d missed it? Probably walked to Cambridge instead. But it would’ve sucked. It also was just the beginning of how much things would suck—it kept snowing, huge storms every Monday, for weeks. The T stopped running entirely. The soulless people at the evil company emailed us all to say that the best part about the office was that it was walkable from so many places in Boston, I guess, to try and guilt people to walk in during a blizzard. My apartment had oil heat, and we had to shovel the yard up to where the fill for the tank was; one day, I thought I was there only to realize I had like five more feet to go.
But it was also beautiful and completely absurd. We helped a neighbor unearth their car—they had broken their shovel and resorted to, ineffectually, using a plastic tub. The mayor had to get on the TV to tell everyone to stop jumping out of their second-story windows. My roommate, who was constantly coming up with craft activities, filled a few squeeze bottles with food coloring and water, and we used them to draw flowers into the eight-foot snowbanks along our street.
All of the photos from that time are unbelievable. Also, here on a fifty-degree January day, it is hard to imagine anything like it again. This winter is absurd in a different way—though today and then are both, at opposite ends of the spectrum, extreme. I don’t know how we will look back on it—though, C. reminded me that 2015 also started out relatively snowless until it wasn’t. It’s just so hard to see from the present, right?
In the midst of remembering all this, I also remembered a different moment—first, misremembered as part of 2015’s snow and then re-remembered as another, earlier winter. I did have to walk to my job—on a weekend, no less. I worked at the toy store then, which, despite the blizzard the night before, was open in the morning.
On my way, somewhere on Huntington Ave., I reached a corner that appeared to have been plowed in. So, I scaled the snowbank. I thought it was the only way to get around until I reached the top and saw, just a few feet to the right, a man walking through the gap where the snow had been neatly shoveled away. We stopped for a moment—me, feeling a bit silly and him, I’m sure, wondering what the fuck I was doing. And then we both laughed.