While with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things.
William Wordsworth, Tintern Abbey
This year in Minnesota has so far been notably lacking in a resource we usually rely heavily on — for entertaining ourselves and our kids, for income (if you’ve got a plow) and of course for remarking upon, whether we’re in a complaining mood (ugh, more snow, when is it going to stop?) or a fanciful one (isn’t it lovely, a snowglobe snow, really!). Wherever you fall on the Snow Appreciation Spectrum (SAS), the lack of it this year has made almost everyone feel a little off around here.
As it happens, I am an extremist on the SAS, far to the Appreciation side of winter. I’m with Thoreau on this one, his senses engaged to the full for the beauty of a “Winter Walk”:
The ground is sonorous, like seasoned wood, and even the ordinary rural sounds are melodious, and the jingling of the ice on the trees is sweet and liquid. There is the least possible moisture in the atmosphere, all being dried up, or congealed, and it is of such extreme tenuity and elasticity, that it becomes a source of delight. The withdrawn and tense sky seems groined like the aisles of a cathedral, and the polished air sparkles as if there were crystals of ice floating on it.
We had an added layer of hope for a Good Snow this time around, because we bought X-C skis for the boys as an early Christmas present. We’ve kept them in the car for weeks just in case it snows because they are so eager to try them out. (By the way, I had this lovely moment when I opened the back of the Mazda to put the groceries in and where I usually just see a cluttered car to cluck my tongue and fuss over, I saw a dear mess of artifacts: the pointy skis, a book of Calvin and Hobbes, bright orange acrylic paintings from my 3-year-old, homework that’s been ignored1, a mug of frozen raspberry tea, etc. The idea that drifted over me and imbued this scene was: just how I always thought it would be. A friend of mine put that phrase - just how I always thought it would be - under a photograph of her daughter and herself baking in the kitchen once years ago, and it’s stuck with me. A Moment. A whole Melody made up of a tangle of tangible things which somehow sang to my soul: it is Good. It was so much like Pure Duration after all.)
So anyway, the boys got skis. And what I asked for Christmas was snow.
Christmas Day came and went with none of the white stuff. I have new memories of my kids’ galoshes and grins jumping in puddles and squinting into the rain to discern an archery target for the new bow. It was strange. I shook my head when I glimpsed the skis later that day, still unused.
And so it was that I found myself standing on the front stoop on the very last day of the Gregorian calendar year and feet still firmly in the Christmas season when I suddenly I smelled it. No, felt it. Smelled it? I glanced up at the sky which has been So Very Grey for months and nothing looked different, but my nostrils were now quivering like an animal’s. A distinct chilled-powder smell was wafting in. Metallurgic, mineral. Like wet stones suddenly freeze-dried and dispersed. But also kind of — briskly minty? I could not yet see the snowflakes, but I knew they were coming.
Less than a hour later, flurries were floating down. Pure joy. But how had I known? The short answer was, of course, experience. I’ve lived here my whole life and have a volume of instinct that is privately self-gratifying. (Ha! I knew it! Takes a Minnesotan, you know.) But this wasn’t quite satisfying to me anymore. Another answer was the one Wordsworth gives: there are times when we see into the life of things. But I couldn’t shake how I’d smelled it more than seen it.
So I fired up a few text threads with people I thought might know: a weather scientist who used to live in Antartica, a massage therapist who specializes in facial release, and a couple of the trustiest Internet explorers I now (humans not search engines). As our makeshift research team soon found out, anatomists have pinpointed a nerve that might be able to sense things otherwise. What I mean by that is that its perceptivity does not neatly fall into the five senses we are taught in primary school. Actually, it’s three nerves bound up together by a gangly, central mass near our temples. From that central location, each of the three branches spread up to our eyes (opthamalic branch), our sinus area (maxillary), and our upper jaw (mandibular). Think of the coolness of mint or the heat of a habanero. Because these nerves stream right by our nasal passages, we associate these sensations with smell, but they are detecting otherwise.
But what was it exactly about snow that my Newly Discovered Sense was detecting? Apparently the pressure and humidity changes combine in our nasal passages and the nearby trigeminal nerve that together create an impression of scent. Can even our noses can be a place where Attention is cultivated?
The So Very Grey Sky has a kind of vibe to it. (Maybe our trigeminal nerve has something to do with that too.) When you live with its bland sameness for long enough, it’s understandable that your body might start trying to make sense of the slightest alterations in quirky ways. Linda Legarde Grover in Onigamiising; Seasons of an Ojibwe Year writes:
When I was a little girl, I liked going outside on overcast spring and fall mornings because on some days, and I never knew which ones they would be. I could hear a comforting, melodically tuneless sound coming from the sky. This was a sort of low musical sound that seemed to change pitch every few seconds; I suppose there is probably a scientific explanation having to do with laws of physics and barometer and humidity.
Science can explain many things, but not necessarily everything.
I love that.
I wrote a few weeks ago about waiting under an unchangeable sky and a sort of longing for those heavens to be torn asunder. This image resonated with many of you. It was as if we no longer heard the Song of the Sky. I’ve done some more thinking about this and it seems to me that sometimes it’s a question of letting the hem out. I don’t mean manipulating the edges of the sky itself, its broad and dull cloth in those seasons. We have no control over that. But rather the hem of our vision. How can we move from the close-set, minuscule worlds we’re focused narrowly on to something greater, roomier, beyond? My prayer might be put thus:
Let out the hem of my vision. I’ve kept the crinkle-corners of the eye stitched too tight, letting in only a hint of heaven’s light. I need a capaciousness to sight things anew, for this is a high and holy day. Make room for the flocks upon flocks in migratory pattern; their wings freed in the rarefied air. Make room for walks and tiny fingers clasped around mine, piercing eyes alongside my own. Remind me to exercise the peripheral, right and left, the retina already thicker and stronger there, so as to increase my capacity to see.
Give me a habitable, hospitable field of Vision; for as my eyes are, so is my heart.
I don’t have time to explain this now, but I get a little jolt of satisfaction from this. I know, weird right?
She doesn't have to say she's faithful,
Yet she's true, like ice, like fire.
Bob Dylan
We know nothing of what we sense but only for our wondering and imagination. But travel, it is swift and easy in our wonderment and imagination. And it is then that the inexplicable becomes alive! We see and hear and feel then what was not before. The world. But perhaps we see even another world. My brother, your father wrote "Oh new horizon on hopeful wings unborne." Yes, I think another world. We can go there. Yes, with the 'smell of snow." Uncle Alan