snow days at the end of the world

in blankness i remember... i'm a junkyard treasure

If you don’t believe in ghosts, please leave me here.

Walter Launt Palmer, Hoar Frost

Lily and I were raised in the crooked, ancient farmhouse where our father grew up, with doorways so slanted you had to cock your head to see straight. Marbles rolled down the hall without a push. Pappy ended up there because his mother was young and newly single and she wanted to be close to the Benedictine Abbey across town. The town, if you can imagine, was called Bethlehem.

Our house was shadowy and damp owing to the wetlands behind it and the thick trees all around. Everyone who crossed the threshold could feel the prickle of ghosts. But in the snow, it was cozy and bright, and everything was possible.

Every night I felt the spirits moving around my bed, and every night I said a dozen Our Fathers. I’m sure my lips kept popping through my sleep because I was always afraid. The house herself was a great, looming creature, rooting ever-deeper into the wet, pebbly cellar.

Mornings we sang the Salve Regina on our drive to school. We studied in the fancy town next door and you could see money all over the changing landscape: old Colonials bumped out with additions; in every yard, a swimming pool.

We owned a silver Subaru DL, which was not ritzy like the Subaru GL’s most of our peers had. Pappy—a waning aristocrat, drawn to Dorothy Day’s Catholicism because of his belief that money equaled unhappiness—delighted in our practical tin can, which he dubbed the “Dumb Luck.” As compared to the “Good Lookin,’” a model for shinier folk. Neither phrase was a compliment and neither phrase was an insult. He just preferred it, down at the bottom.

Autoweek calls the Subaru DL “a junkyard treasure,” and we were Dumb Luckers all the way: culturally sophisticated, but—until Mom made it big—shoppers of K-mart layaway. The DL got dents nobody planned to fix. We lived in a house we could afford: a free one, built in 1787. We had no choice but to abide the snap-crackle of stuck souls.

What does it mean to be a Dumb Lucker? It means you can never be a Good Lookin’ if you’re trying to be, and you’re the kind of person who knows you’ll never find enfranchisement in a car. It means being an intellectual—the sort who might not go to college because authority is suspect. You’ll learn all your history in an encyclopedia dragged into the bathroom, so it takes no less than ninety minutes to poop. It means raising kids in a haunted house, but arming them with hymns known only to the cloistered.

One morning, we woke to powder, thigh high. The sun was out and the world shone with prisms of color. Snow like diamonds. Snow that was hard to sled in until you made the first tracks. But you could only play a little while because, in those days, you went to school in any weather. (Uphill, both ways.)

Noses pink, cheeks chapped, panting, we piled into the DL and belted out Latin. Mom was on hiatus, so we were all together, and that was always magic. As we rounded the steep turn between Owen Hatfield’s cow pastures, Pappy stopped singing. He was the loudest, most passionate vocalist—always off-key—so his silence was both a relief and a warning. HOLD ONTO YOUR HATS! he shouted, guiding us over ice, into a ditch.

What does snow do for us? It’s eternal and it’s erasure. It’s life and it’s death. It’s telescoping into all of the selves you’ve ever been; waking up to blankness and assessing what’s possible. Realizing, as you take your first steps into that white-blue expanse—everything is.

Christopher and I are raising our boys in the Northeast, an hour from Bethlehem. We’re in the woods now, and the houses are old, but they have swimming pools. I worry if we drove a Subaru…it’d be a GL.

On Tuesday, I rose to a heavy, still silence; the coziness of being blanketed by a storm. It’s been a few years since our last big snow; a few years since I woke up, nine years old. I worry about a world with no snow. I worry about our planet, and about us. How will we mythologize without the symbols of the seasons?

How many snow days will our boys have? I wondered, following them out into the dark. There’s a hill in the field behind us and I dragged Clyde in the plastic toboggan. It could’ve been a moon landing. It could’ve been 1993 and Lily and me, riding the silver hill between the trees, an hour of glee before we slid into Owen Hatfield’s ditch.

I shared a photo of Augie catching air on a jump. “Does he have all his teeth?” a friend asked with the wow/ yikes/ you’re insane emoji. I didn’t write back that I’d sacrifice a tooth for this: for going out before the sun, the only ones building mounds in the drift. How could we not, when every snow day might be our last?

“Hold onto your hats!” I heard myself shout, diving onto the chipped orange plastic, my belly in my throat. We’re still Dumb Luckers. And the snow revealed it.

❄️❄️❄️

Tuesday night, I reread The Dead from Joyce’s Dubliners, which I remember from Mrs. Beasley’s English class (hi, Beas!). That prickly ending: the house haunted by competing dreams. I thought of the car ride with Pappy; of these four boys, three of whom he never met, and me between them. O clemens, O pia, O dulcis Virgo Maria.

+ The end of The Dead, if you care for a shiver:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, on the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

PS: Wednesday night, our last walk to get the zoomies out before dinner. This is where a DL mom takes her kids to play.

PPS: The next three Sunday emails will be for paid subscribers. I’d love to have you with us.