A Letter Home - Camden

prompt: snow

Thank you Cindy for telling me to post this; going back and revising gave me some good ideas for expanding this.

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It snowed in the summertime, fat white flakes that fell from the sky in clumsy waltzes. I couldn’t believe it, first time I saw it. Standing outside in the summer sun with the neighbors, watching the snow pile up along the street and drifting up against doors. Freak phenomenon? No. It snowed the next day. And the next day. It wasn’t until the 4th of July had to be cancelled due to a chance of snow that the mayor finally acknowledged there was a problem.

“But what,” he said, spreading his arms wide to the convened town, “can we do?”

Not one of us had an answer for him as to how we might control the weather, and we all quietly agreed to blame global warming.

It still snowed. On and off, all the way into winter. One hundred and fifty three days of snow, until Christmas when the sky darkened from crisp blue to grey like dishwater and the rain washed the snow into the gutters. Turned those fine flakes into soot.

I sort of missed the snow, fully expecting never to see snow again, or certainly not the snowmen, unmelting, in the bright sunlight of June-July-August. I was wrong. It came back promptly in the end of May. It was a different snow this time, though. It was warm. I couldn’t believe it, looking out of the kitchen to see school children change from uniforms to bathing suits, grabbing their parents’ trowels and tupperware and charging into the street to build snowcastles. It was a warm, icy snow covered houses and threatened to cover streets. I salted the steps of the house as best as I could, but they were insistently slippery, and I had to hold the railing when I left in the evenings. The mayor called another meeting. His arm in a cast, he pleaded, “what is going on?”

No one had an answer for him and we all agreed to blame the government.

But it kept snowing. Every year, it snowed in the summer just as the old folks claimed it never had. Always a different snow storm then the previous year too. Snow that could never be grasped or shaped fully. The children were sad that year. And there was the sticky snow that was impossible to get out of carpets and the grooves between fingers and the soles of shoes. One time it was snow so cold that I damn near gave myself frostbite cleaning the windowpanes. We got hot snow too, so scalding to the touch that not a person in the town was left without blisters the size of snowflakes by the time Christmas came around. Grey snow fell one year that gave everyone a shadow of a different color. My shadow was pink like washed socks. The dog’s was blue, just blue like the air. The mayor’s shadow was a fine shade of yellow, found in toilets mostly, although sometimes in lemons that dropped before they were ripe.

It could never be collected. This was the most infuriating thing about the whole business - there wasn’t anybody to blame because there wasn’t anybody who tell what it was, was it even snow, even. It was the children who discovered this, packing snowballs into their thermos’ and lunchboxes, in a bid to create some tidy chaos in the classrooms. The lunchboxes, the thermos’ would be empty. As with the scientists who came around to tell us what was wrong; the samples they took each year would turn up empty or missing, without fail.

4th of July quietly got relocated to 4th of December and the town held a meeting each year instead (weather permitting.) No one ever had any answers for us. We never had any answers for each other. We blamed the communists. The farmers. The homosexuals, the foreigners, lawyers, extraterrestrials, poets, the upperclass, the lowerclass, the Devil, and finally, God, though we never blamed anyone with very much conviction.

It just kept snowing too, it just kept on snowing.