Snow Daze By Jamie Kirkpatrick

Well, we’ve broken the seal on this winter’s snowfall. It was hardly a blizzard—a mere frosting, in fact—but enough to whet our collective appetite for the white stuff. Our friends to the north and west may feel otherwise, but here on the Eastern Shore, winter’s first official snowfall was genteel, polite. There’s surely more to come, but right now, I feel I might be able to make friends with snow.

This morning, my wife is in the kitchen making chili. Not chilly like it is outside, but the warming kind that we’ll consume in front a cozy fire this evening. I’m in the living room, thinking about all those hard-working Somali immigrants up in frigid Minnesota who are wondering if they made the right decision while trying to learn a language in which “chili” and “chilly” are not only different parts of speech, but also sound exactly the same even though spelled differently and have completely different meanings. Welcome to the wonderful world of ESL, my Somali friends, and while we’re on the subject, watch out for ice and ICE!

There was a time when snow meant sledding and snowballs and big rubber galoshes that snapped shut. We bundled up with scarfs, clip-on mittens, and hats with ear flaps and we couldn’t get enough of the white stuff. Years later, in my schoolteacher life, snow meant something more: a two-hour delay, or, even better, a day or two off. Then there was the year we got dumped on, and by the third or fourth day of containment, I had a bad case of cabin fever and an aching back from all the shoveling I had to endure. (OK, that last part isn’t true: I was fortunate to live on my school’s campus, and the maintenance crew—most of whom came from Central America—kept my sidewalk snow-free.)

Anyway, it’s still early in the season and snow isn’t yet a nemesis. In fact, for reasons I still can’t explain, in a few days, I’ll get on a plane and head off to Montana for a “ski” vacation with twenty-three (I think) other family members. I put “ski” in quotations marks in the previous sentence because I’m the only one who doesn’t ski, but no matter: there’s an enormous stone fireplace in the lodge and my Kindle will be loaded with all manner of good reading material. At night, when all the skiers are back in the nest, I’ll be more than content to hear about what transpired on the mountain. I’m an expert vicarious skier!

I’m sure there will come a day in February or March when I’ll scream if I see one more snowflake falling out of a cold, gray sky, but for now, this snow is still mesmerizing, lovely. And it’s not just snow’s visual impact, but also the muffled silence that comes with it that soothes my noisy soul. When I awoke this morning, I peered out on a thin blanket of snow. Nothing was moving; it was as if the whole world had rolled over and gone back to sleep. So I did just that.

In the opening line of William Shakespeare’s play “Richard III,” the evil protagonist Richard of Gloucester muses about “the winter of our discontent.” Despite the fact that the War of the Roses is ending and the House of York is ascendent, when we meet Richard on stage, he is grousing about his own physical deformities and plotting all manner of villainy including murder against his brother, the “sun of York,” King Edward IV. In the centuries since Richard first uttered his morose monologue, it has taken on a more collective meaning, one that captures all manner of social and political malaise. Sound familiar? But no; let’s not go there today. Let’s just stay in this present snowy moment.

The snow that fell overnight is just vanilla frosting on winter’s cake. Enjoy it while you can; there’s surely more to come…

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay. His editorials and reviews have appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine. His most recent novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon and in local bookstores. His newest novel, “The People Game,” is scheduled for publication in February, 2026. (It’s available for pre-order now on Amazon.) His website is musingjamie.net.