Natalie Mendolia December 17, 2013

Snow: Look Beyond It

It is so unexpected when you lose a loved one. You may spend days preparing and
thinking of all the unwilling emotional possibilities when that fateful moment dawns on the
pendulum of your life. But, in truth, nothing can ready you for the stark essence of being left by
someone dear. How will his or herourstory end? Tears or nostalgic laughs? Words that help
you deny or songs that urge you to remember? When will it end? Midnight? In the middle of
lunch? We seem to never know until that heavy telling sun rises and the truth takes shape in
actuality as an interruptive calm in the madness of everyday existence. The surprise is what takes
us out of order and bends our hearts out of shape; we cease to have control, and that, my friends,
is just simply a scary idea.
Yet, we gather in a funeral home with the tools of our tissues and reapplied makeup,
photos of old memories and quiet sobs. We stare at the event that has unfolded before us and has
awakened issues we have so slyly tucked under the beds of our subconscious. We try to fix the
conflicts created by such a lapse in progress. We grieve. We fall from the clouds of our security
like the quiet release of snowflakes during a winter tempest.
Have you ever watched the nature of a snowstorm? Inevitable and dangerous in nature, it
taunts us on news channels and radio stationsa monster hiding in the closet of tightly
scheduled and agenda-filled modernity. It doesnt absorb the whole nation or the whole globe but
covers enough ground and traverses enough land that its unassailable presence betides with
irrefutability. It is interference in the routine we have spent dollars and tears and time to create;
our schools are delayed, our jobs are inconvenienced. Nonetheless, our children play happily in
its white fleece approaching. Nonetheless, roads are covered, and travel is tiresome. We are stuck
amongst circumstances out of our control, and so we flip the television channel with our thumbs
as the arbitrators and silence the creak in our couches with bent hips. We grieve our
powerlessness.
Have you ever watched the process of grieving in slow motion? Although we knew death
was inescapable, the shock still arrives with full force. The abrupt disturbance turns into fury and
bitterness and heady sorrow on the faces of those who suffered more than the one lost, the one
traveling beyond our ephemeral world into unknown realms. We may take days to meet and
greet with peace and acceptance or our minds and hearts may demand an eternity. Our lives do
Natalie Mendolia December 17, 2013
not fall apart in entirety, but such a blow to our known possessions and secure world can travel
from our relationships to our health to our faith and the children we raise. Time seems like it
stops as we realize the universe does not exist in only our eyes and outward perception of the
mortal existence crafted with flesh and fire, water and wind, air and aura; it also exists in the
intangible factors of uncertaintythe things we cannot explain or prove. Maybe through it all we
cant speak. Maybe we eat like starvation was upon us. Maybe we laugh until the pain cannot be
covered anymore. Maybe we are just one with that winter storm: victims.
Nevertheless, the snow continues to fall, and when it stops we are left with a mess. So,
we gather in the street with the tools of shovels and picks, gloves and burdensome coats. We
stare at the event that has unfolded before us and awoke issues we have so slyly tucked under the
beds of our timetables. We try to fix the conflicts created by such a lapse in progress. We rest,
we shovel, and we grasp the time offeredthe delay. We become one with the atmosphere and
the turbulent forecast as the sky looks down and watches us fade between snow and sorrow,
between an icy driveway and a funeral home.
Ultimately, it is all quite simple. Cold weather is the ceremonious stage upon which the
universe manipulates puppets of storms and blizzards, superciliously hanging the answers to our
mortality blatantly in front of our eyes: on top of our cars, in-between the ridges on the soles of
snow boots, in the small hands of a curious shivering toddler. We are so nave to think nature
cannot tell us of the future or of the secrets to human existence. What a term! Human existence;
compendious in actuality yet so malleable amongst the warmth of the mind, just as the natural
worldthe flora and fauna, the countrysideresides. Trees become the tortured, stolen canvas
of bank reports and water is polluted by our greed; the mind wields a malicious, abusive scourge
on the calm of natures cosmos. Thus, snow is undeniably a funny thing for it almost searches for
our manipulative hands; masochistic as its virginal form falls from the home of pure sky simply
to settle in the dirt and soil and ebony of sidewalks and mountains and roofs. We people seem to
do much of the same. Born of spirits or small earthly molecules or from the land, however you
choose to explain Us, we avoid living in the actuality of our birthplace simply to seek adventure
in the blackness of questioning. A path with winding roads seems more enticing than one of a
short, uncurving inherence. Nature makes the chaos of suffering so simple. She takes water and
transforms it to a white magic of such easy attraction so as to offer a hint for surviving turmoil
and bearing its bitter face: the storm will come as the dark sky and chilled air suggest, it will
Natalie Mendolia December 17, 2013
change the moment with its difference, and peace will only come when you face the reality of
such a dastardly yet almost welcomed attendance on our roster of human time.
Follow the moment, she tells us. Do not fight it. Take its hand and walk down whatever
road to which it may lead you with grace and openness.
And, yet, what we hear is just a deafening amalgamation of wind and slosh and Five
more inches by tomorrow radiating from a television set.
Take my hand, child. I will guide you home.
James, buy a shovel!
I give you the air your lungs must breathe, so trust me. I am pure, beloveds; I am.
Mom, theres no school! May Beth cries from her room, reading an electronically
fabricated e-mail. She misses the soft pleading taps of empyrean snowflakes telling her to listen,
to let them in after such a long journey, but she simply sighs with relief.
Phew. I have more time. more time to procrastinate and move backwards as her life
moves forwards.
Open your eyes, children.
Close the door before the cold comes in, kids! And dont you dare track snow in this
house!
Why do we seek the hard path of complication and mischief? Why dont we open our
eyes? Well, that is just too unchallenging. How will we prove the validity of our ego?
We wont.
Eventually, whether we listen to Nature or notchoose peace or pridethe storm ends
and the funeral home closes. Snow days of sleds and laughter and revelry mark the end of a
mourning period. The luminosity has fallen and our loved one has passed on. The residue of our
feelings rests in the dirty, tainted snow under our feet. It wallows for it remains encrusted in ice
but incontrovertibly ephemeral; all water must follow the change of temperature and all emotions
must pursue the simple progression that is humanity. Though, I dare to ask you: will we listen
next time when a rainstorm ruins a pair of new suede shoes? Or when our skin is coated in a burn
from a hot, joyous beach sun? Will we take our fate and realize the simple answer, or will we
follow our tragic nature and cause more thrill and sensation than necessary? As the storm
becomes a discarnate memory, she leaves the question in our frost-bitten, tear-laden hands.
Natalie Mendolia December 17, 2013
She wanders as rain and sun, wind and thunder across the earth to find an opening into
our minds. And so, eternally believing, she follows the souls of youth who originally blossom
with a different sight than the wrinkled hands who guide them. Beautifully innocent children of
all ages wonder in the trenches of her mystifying and frigid dust that blind in the sun and hide
under the moon. They have no understanding of where they play and in what their hands press
down firmly. They build charismatic figures out of their mortality and laugh when it pains the
chest of another whose dust has fallen down his shirt and touched the bare exposed plane of his
skin. The excitement and merrymaking have such irony, for our parents and guardians possess
neither a concern nor a curiosity about our play. They merely watch us gallivant and troop
around in yards and parks and ponds, simply breathing a short sigh of solace.
Let the kids have fun, honey. We can finally sit down and rest. They walk into the
house to watch through the window from afar and share a kissa tender connection by two
analogous faces of lethargic exhaustion. Nature knows they are not to blame for such arbitrary
deterrence, but she expects more. Thus, she waits; she waits for those with enough spare time
and curiosity to look beyond her products and find her.
Personally, snow days are a time to catch up on things Ive neglected and spend endless
hours cooped up cozily in bed with a book, television, and tea mug at hand. So many across the
globe Thank God! for a break from life but ignore the crucial message that surrounds us in
heaping piles of euphoria: what is finite in nature is finite in the heartthe bloodand what
covers unnatural edifices uncovers a path to earthly tranquility. Yet, we see a chance to be
interrupted, whether unwillingly or not. We see magic.
In the correlatively created words of J.B. Priestley, The first fall of snow is not only an
event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite
different, and if this is not enchantment then where is it to be found?
Nature is a kind mistress, but she is not a foolish maiden.
Her obvious gift, worthy of those present enough to whole-heartedly court knowledge,
was crafted out of love for her children. Of course the fall of snow will be enticing and
misleading; the clue is simple to find but the message demands more. After all, a treasure chest
left in plain sight always has a lockgold must be earned.
Mommy, lets go play.
Snow must be learned.