When Winter Came

I remember my first trip to the snow. It wasn’t about getting dressed up accept to keep warm. It wasn’t about expensive boots because I enjoyed being fitted by a friendly lady at the hire shop in a kind of Cinderella moment. It wasn’t about social media. It wasn’t about a fancy ski chalet or arriving in an aeroplane. The fact that I almost died along with my mother and father and sisters doesn’t even blemish the memory. I had a wonderful time.

We had been invited with a large group of families who had hired an old scout hall in an Australian ski town. My father left it too late to put safety chains on our car and in blizzard conditions the vehicle veered off to the side of the road whereby we were hanging over a drop of many hundreds of metres. It was a very Griswold’s family moment, quite serious though, with all of  us having to be delicately rescued. I recall my father screaming;

“Everybody move to the left of the car, we need to redistribute weight.”

Upon being safely removed from the car my mother slid on her rear end to the bottom of a considerably sloped road. I remember it well because I was chastised quite seriously for laughing as she slid down the sleet covered tar, screaming her head off in a Pepsi Cola beanie with a pom pom attached. It seemed there was nothing else to do but laugh by this stage. I was probably seven or eight years old.  

It seemed doomed from the start. The weather forecast was rather dismal. The weatherman was playing tricks in the sky but I just smiled in the upside down way of life at how it doesn’t always work out the way you wish it to. The funny part was, I never did feel cold for a single moment. I’d always wanted to see snow. My life was in The Sutherland Shire of Sydney at the time, not so cold, warm Summers, a hop skip and jump to the beach as it rolled about dressed in those delicious salty lashings of ocean bliss. My holidays were always up north - tropical and humid enough to make my hair turn into fairy floss kisses. The snow was a whole new experience. Still, I was so excited by the Winter Wonderland adventure it didn’t feel cold. I suppose it was a rather humble place to stay but children don’t often care about the trappings of money, thankfully. I remember laying close with other children in sleeping bags on the floor after drinking hot chocolate from brightly coloured camping cups.

One boy, I’d known previously, asked me to zip his sleeping bag to his so we could make a larger whole? Or was it so we could make a smaller whole, two bodies huddled together like one in the excitement of a new adventure.

It was the very first time I had made a person out of snow. Ah, to be a sculptor is something inherently living in all of us. Children want to create. They want to partake in real magic, the magic of making something together. We made a person from snow. I leant my mittens to the boy who was next to me during the night because he didn’t have any. I wasn’t cold. It was all too much fun to be cold.

I remember laying on a wooden floor and it didn’t feel hard or uncomfortable. The softness of coloured bedding was floating across the surface of harder angles like a watercolour painting with blurred edges. I remember when Winter came to the outside scene with snow like softened pearls it didn’t feel cold. I remember the trees in their bareness and naked humility were dressed in diamonds, shining like a diamond, dusted in a dress of icicle like dreams, not forced or manufactured or constructed but beautiful and raw and real and it didn’t look sad underneath. It didn’t feel uncomfortable. It didn’t feel cold. It didn’t look sad. It was a wonderland.