Light snow today in Ohio, and a nor’easter is moving up the Eastern Seaboard, promising as much as two feet in some areas. I find myself craving snow more intensely as I get older. I cheer like a child whenever flurries fall. Maybe it has to do with the silence it brings, how it tranquilizes the world for a while. Or because a snowstorm is one of the few remaining shared events that cannot be misinterpreted or denied. Perhaps my attraction is more symbolic: the blank slate, everything buried and wiped clean. Maybe I savor this weather because I know it’s becoming more rare as the world overheats. No matter the cause, my hunger for snow grows each year, and I nurture increasingly elaborate fantasies about Greenland’s snowfields and the Siberian Express.
Tonight I’ve started reading The Terror, Dan Simmons’s haunted variation on Captain Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated quest across the Arctic where it gets so cold your teeth can explode.
