Zoomed in snowdrift

A frozen world
London, ON
February 2020
This photo originally shared on Instagram

The scene: A parking lot in mid-winter. The brilliant sun hanging in the perfectly blue late morning sky is reflecting so brightly off of the dirty snowbank at my feet that I can barely see even through my sunglasses.

But still, I want to remember this little mini-vignette, because soon enough it’ll be gone, either melted by the relentless sun, or covered yet again by the next storm gathering over the horizon.

In this parking lot as in life, you act now or risk missing out.

As I take my smartphone out and blindly compose the shot, I think about the snowbanks I played on as a child. It seemed a lot more fun then. I’d deliberately bundle up and head out at the first inkling of snow, and only came in after I was long past exhausted, my woolies reduced to soggy messes. It was glorious.

Something happened to me between then and now, because I no longer embrace the snow and the cold as I once did. Heavy winter weather has become something to be fought, not embraced, and I’m not entirely certain why that happened.

Adulthood so often seems to want to beat the magic out of us, and I wish we could somehow reconnect to the magical innocence that governed the children we used to be. Time travel may not indeed be possible using present-day technology, but there’s no reason the adult me can’t pause in a snowy parking lot and try to remember what it once felt like to play in the snow with reckless abandon.

Indeed, I think this life thing would be a little sweeter if more of us allowed just a sliver of ourselves to not grow up at all.

And as I finish taking the picture and slowly walk back to the responsibilities of my adult life, I smile at the fact that I’ve found a new way to play in, and with, the snow. Bring it, Mother Nature.

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