Take a poll and you'll find 50 percent of all Utahns greet the first snow with a squeal of glee, 50 percent with a moan of woe. And that's understandable. Snow's good and evil in the same flake.
When it nips crops, covers golf courses and gets molded into snowballs for neighborhood wars, you get its dark side. But ski on the stuff, sculpt it, or carve a snow cave to save your life, and snow's not a bad idea at all. In the movie "The Dead," snow is the white death that covers everyone. In Fellini's "Amarcord," snowflakes dance like fireflies. There it's grace, spirit and the essence of life.The first snow in Utah this year was a Fellini kind of snow - light, polite. It didn't snow on anyone's parade, Halloween or deer hunt. It even filled the mountains and refused to stick to the streets.
Then it tended our kids.
"When it started," says third-grader Joanna Johnson (no relation), "I was surprised. It was all over the skylight. I ran upstairs and opened all the windows."
Her sister Elizabeth, showing the wisdom of her years (she's 11) waxed philosophical. "It was OK," she said. "I only get excited about snow when there's a lot of it. The snow the other day melted pretty fast."
Writers may enjoy contemplating Homer's little image of "words like winter snowflakes" and enjoy Emerson's lofty line "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky / Arrives the snow;" but I like games the kids play. Walking around town during the first flakes I heard three girls in a 7-Eleven harmonize on "Winter Wonderland." I heard a 4-year-old say his grandmother up the street got more snow because she lived closer to the mountains.
And I played a favorite game of my own. Freud claimed free association was the royal road to the heart, so I plugged the word "snow" in and let my mind follow its own nose:
"Fleece white as snow," "sins white as snow," snowmen, forts, drifts and geese. Fox and geese, the Arctic Fox, the Arctic Circle and expeditions. Eskimos and their words for snow. "Snowy River," Ivory Snow, Snow White, sleigh bells in the snow and "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas."
At Christmas I no more desire a rose
Than wish a snow in May's newfangled mirth.
- Shakespeare
But in the end, it was that notion of snow having two personalities that came back to me. Just as a knife can both take your life or - in a surgeon's hands - save it, snow can help and hurt you.
Say "snow" instead of "clouds" and tunesmith Joni Mitchell captured the thought: "I've looked at clouds from both sides now . . . and it's clouds illusions I recall. I really don't know clouds, at all."