These days the snow refuses to melt. And when you walk across the crusty whiteness, you leave no footprints. It is not that you are carried by Jesus, as the poem suggests he carries one across the quicksands, snowstorms and other rocky terrain. No, there are no footprints because you have become weightless, insubstantial. You only know you still exist because you can feel the snow's cold wetness. And because you have memories.

[More:]

It is not just the snow-rabbit you made with Phil. You remember playing snowballs with your sister as a child, how too much pressure compacted the fluffiness into an icy ball, how you cried at the thwack of its hardness hitting your cheek.

Over the past twelve months, you have learned a lot about ice: not the physics of it but the feel of it. Your new artist friend has shown you how to watch it, handle it, sculpt it. He teaches you too that everything is symbolic. It is not Phil's studied, scientific, physical nature of snow that matters but your experience of it. What's more, it is a lie to say its whiteness is a lie. If it looks white and it feels white, that is enough.

But is that enough? It still doesn't explain what snow is, what it means. It may not lie, but it is not pretty or kind either. It is damp, uncomfortable and unpredictable, suffocating the ground with its whiteness that may or may not really be white.

Still, you learn to follow new fingers, to chisel ice's coldness into the beauty of swans and flowers, to preserve the perfection as long as possible before it melts. But, secretly, this is the part that you enjoy the most: that graceful slipping from its solid form into liquid; free and flowing.

1 November, 2007