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Toward the end of a winter, once, when I was ten or twelve, I made four snowballs & stowed them away in the basement freezer. It was one of those late February snows that cling to everything & soak up all sound. It packed well. We fought running battles half the morning.

I don’t remember what coup de grace I might’ve been planning. Spring came as usual, & then mosquito season, & I forgot all about it until one day in mid-July, when I was helping put up blueberries. As I was making room for the ranks of bulging blue bags, I discovered four globes of ice in a back corner, gray & lifeless. I went up the outside cellar steps with them & threw them one by one down the back slope into the old grape arbor.

What had made me think such ripeness could be saved forever? Someday our memories, too, will turn hard & gray. We’ll struggle to describe the snow to our great-grandchildren. It drifted down from the night sky like flour, we’ll say, or in wet clumps as big as apple blossoms. Up close the flakes looked like Buddhist symbols: little vajras, wheels with six spokes. Each was unique, but in aggregate the snow made us dream of oneness. It gave cover to mice & the ugliest of wounds.

Wasn’t it cold, they’ll ask, & we’ll say no — a snowdrift could be as warm as a down quilt. I’ll tell the story of our former neighbor Fred, who passed out drunk one night on his way up the hollow & was fortunate enough to tumble into a deep snowdrift. Only his legs, which protruded from the snow, got frostbite & had to be amputated. Sometimes a ruffed grouse would burst from the snow right in front of you in the middle of a still morning, I’ll say, half-doubting my own testimony. The snowpack could change by the day & by the hour, & when the sun came out you could see the shadow of the sky itself, blue, blue.