Snow!

Yesterday it snowed, and it was magical.

Almost two months have flown off the calendar and Christmas is almost here. Stony faced Koreans representing the Salvation Army are relentlessly ringing bells in subway stations. We had a secret Santa drawing at work, which we had to do multiple times because of little hitches with the drawing. I drew the same person three times, so I’m not worried about what to get her. If it’s fate, how can I go wrong? People everywhere are talking about their travel plans for Christmas break. Jason and Jordan are going to the Phillipines. Mark and Emma are going back to the UK. I’ll be hollying and jollying and ringing in the new year in Japan. It’s time to get some presents. And fortunately for me, I live in a nation of infinite malls.

I got up on Saturday and got ready to go out shopping. It was gray day, but it didn’t feel grim. The clouds were moving pretty fast, and the cloud cover wasn’t absolute. The sun would peak through the clouds when they quickly drifted by, then cover itself up again a moment later. It was cold front weather. Today is cold, clear, and beautiful. All the clouds have now been pushed completely away by the Siberian wind behind them and left behind an endless clear blue, just like the sky I’m used to seeing on cold days in South Florida.

I leave my room, ready to get out the door and start shopping, but I’m stopped when I see that Karliene is standing by the big sliding glass doors to our balcony, gazing out at the view. It looks like her attention is really focused on something, when she notices I’ve come out of my room.

“Look!”

What am I looking at here?

“It’s snowing. See the snow going by? It’s going by very fast. See it there?”

This is one my least favorite things. When someone tells me to look for something that’s supposedly right in front me. I am massively retarded at this. The most certain failure is when someone wants me to grab something from their desk. If you tell me to get your scissors, they’re just over there on your desk, you will not be getting your scissors in anything approaching a timely manner. It’d be much faster for you to get the scissors yourself. In fact, it might be faster to go down to the nearest grocery store and see if they have a pair of scissors there, because I might not find your damn scissors at all. They’re right WHERE?? THERE’S NOTHING BUT PENS IN THAT CUP. WHERE ELSE ON THE DESK COULD THEY BE??

*ahem*

So, nope, I did not see it there. But I was glad to hear about it. Now I had something more to look forward to when I got downstairs.


The main reason, for those of you who don’t know, that snow is cool is that the way it falls is so darn whimsical. Rain goes in a straight line, almost always. Sometimes when it’s windy, it’s a diagonal line, but it’s still a line. The only time you really see it swirling about is in a hurricane, which, don’t get me wrong, looks really cool, but you so really get to see it, and it tends to be associated with property damage then. The best part of rain is when it’s warm and you don’t have anywhere to be and you can run around in it. The way it falls to the earth isn’t so remarkable, though.

Snow, on the other hand, at least when it’s windy, like it was on Saturday, seems like it doesn’t know what path to take to get to the ground. It draws little curlicues in the air and meanders about for a while before the ground finally says “Okay, that’s enough.” Sometimes it doesn’t hit the ground at all. It gets close and then it pulls a move like that feather in Forrest Gump and just says, Fuck it, man! I’m going back up! and then it swirls back up into the air, mingles with a bunch of friends, loses itself in the crowd, and then goes who knows where. Light snowfall really doesn’t give a fuck where it goes. Anywhere is fine.

This wasn’t the first time I’d seen snow since I got here. It was the second. The first time was a couple weeks ago, on a night when it actually wasn’t quite freezing at street level. It was a few degrees warmer on the ground, but it was cold enough in the sky for the clouds to release some tiny, reluctant flakes which melted the instant they made contact with the earth, or with a car, or with my face.

I was in a bus with Jason and Jordan, a couple of Americans who teach in the same city that I do, though not the same school. Jason saw the snow first. Actually, I might not even have recognized it as snow on my own. These were such faint flurries, it was more like swirling dust kicked up by some local construction, or demolition, than any kind of weather phenomenon. I can’t say it was picturesque, is what I’m trying to say. It was the snow equivalent of that little tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. But dammit, in life, your first is always special. You remember your first.

“This is a first for me” I said.

“It must be very magical” Jason said, a little ironically.

The thing was though, it actually WAS magical in a way. Like I said, this was not an impressive snowfall, but it was a snowfall all the same, and it was happening right in front of my eyes. The snow was saying, yup, I’m real. Nice to meet you.

I replied to Jason, “Yes, it is magical. I’m going to remember this forever.” And you know what? For all I know it sounded like I was joking, but I wasn’t. I really will remember how, about a month after I got to Korea, I was riding a bus with Jason and Jordan and I saw snow falling for the first time. That’s going to be in the Korea scrapbook in my head for the rest of my life.
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So that’s that.