Just when the days start to feel longer, it sinks in that winter has come. This is the part of the season that makes people complain and move to LA. After the white and pink of new snow and cold cheeks and Valentine’s Day, there is nothing to do but endure the sullen and gray afternoons and wonder interminably if the sun has risen yet.
I was waiting in a bubble of people for the light to change on the corner of 54th and 3rd when snowflakes started to come down. I had never seen it snow in the city before. That night, from my bed, I watched flakes falling through the streetlights’ yellowish cast and tried to figure out why I felt so unsettled, like I’d had too much coffee on an empty stomach. Maybe because I’d never watched a snowfall like this from anywhere but my bed at home?  No, that’s not right; I probably saw more snow through the windows of my college dormrooms in Western Massachusetts and Upstate New York than I did in the four years that I lived officially in my family’s blue house on a hill in Southwestern Connecticut.
I used to watch flakes blow sideways at the windows and feel like I was flying headfirst through space with tiny stars coming straight at me. Warm and dry in the house, it seemed like the world had grown very still as it hunkered down to wait for the end of the storm. We kept a ruler stood on end out on the deck to measure all that accumulated over night. If it keeps falling through morning, it takes half a day for the family-owned plow trucks to roll out. I always liked looking at my dad’s and my dog’s footprints in the snow.
Snow in the city is nothing like that. I couldn’t see flakes against the dark sky because the city sky is never dark. When I looked at the rows of windows across the street, I more than half expected to see them filled with rosy faces watching, watching, watching, but everyone was asleep. The sound of a city plow clanking against the curb startled me awake at 4AM. Snow was still falling, but New Yorkers don’t believe in waiting it out. No one pauses at the window and holds their breath.  By the time I walked down the street to catch the train to work, nothing but slush was melting in the gutters.
Slush, I’m used to that. The way tires churn it like a frothy cake batter. The way it looks, at times, both solid and liquid, but is neither. The way it splashes and immediately makes your cringe and think, ‘wet shoes…’ The way, after awhile, the plow shovels are just pushing it to one side of the gray street and back.
The monotonous days of winter are upon us. Nothing more to accumulate here.
