“Snow”

: “When he first gazed upon such a morning as a child, Skylar had been stunned by the sight of a world utterly transfigured. It looked as if nature had grown tired of concrete and asphalt, of straight lines and right angles, and decided to remake the face of the earth. What had been rough, was now smooth, what had been black, white. Where dormant grass and mud had been, there was now an impeccable sweep of million-sequined white. Nature had muffled the harsh sounds of passing cars or scared them off the road completely. She had as much as said “Allow me to show you how, quietly, in an hour or two, I can hide all the ugly excrescences of man, bury them under the powder of my great puff.” Now, sixteen years later, as Skylar stared out the window, rapt by the snow, he felt as if no time had passed and he was that child once more, seeing his first heavenly pure snowscape. It was still early in the morning and the snow, so even that it might have been graded, lay four inches deep on Elm Drive. The lawn leading up to the Art Museum had been replaced by an undulant flooring of travertine, apparently carved by some levitating Phidias. Drifts covered three-quarters of the stop-sign pole, so that the octagon itself was now supported only by a stub, as if it were a hand fan. Tree branches were caked with snow thrice the thickness of the branches themselves; it looked as if the dark brown wood had been carved out of the enveloping white stone. A squat magnolia seemed armed, at the ends of her branches, with dozens of snowballs the shape of hydrangea blooms aimed right at him. The holly tree between Whig and Clio Halls had disappeared behind a cluster of shivering ghosts. The lithe, up-reaching limbs of the beeches and elms along McCosh Walk had found new grace; they reminded Skylar of those of gracile young women, who showed off their tanned skin by wearing fine, white, antique, muslin shawls. The snow set off the buildings with a dramatic chiaroscuro effect: the lightness and whiteness of nature contrasting with the heavy dark stone of the works of man. The snow spoke of the effortless and pure, the buildings, of the labored and earthly; the snow promised fun, but the buildings, work; the snow whispered of imagination and enchantment, but the buildings, of drudgery and everything prosaic.”