With all the cold we’ve had lately, the talk soon turned to snow. How much, and when, and would it stick? And do you remember the last time it snowed, or when the harbor froze over, or the week we lost power? Winter is full of adventure stories.
On Saturday, Becky even said she could smell the snow. All my life, I’ve heard people say that, but I still don’t quite know what they mean. Snow is just frozen water; snow has no smell. Perhaps they mean the smell of the cold. Or they can feel the change in the air.
I’d hoped to watch the Geminid meteor shower on Saturday night, but the clouds, heavy with future snow, intruded. I remember last year’s meteor show. I sat alone on Surfside Beach somewhere near two in the morning, the moon so full and brilliant I cast a shadow along the empty beach. Gemini rose above Orion the Hunter. I had missed that constellation all summer, searching the sky each night until his gradual return in the fall.
I wished on every falling star that my car—which was slowly dying in those days—would start up alright and I could get back home. (Happily, that wish was granted.)
It’s hard to believe a whole year has passed since then. A lot of it has been strangely beautiful.
One of the hardest things about living in a seasonal place is that you feel, so acutely, how temporary everything is. There are constellations of different people here from April to October. There is a new world made each summer, but it doesn’t last. Maybe that’s a good thing, where else do you get to make and remake a world twice a year?
My older friends tell me that nature holds something exciting in each season. So, even though we find ourselves in the deepest dark of the year, I try to be out in the world as much as possible. I do my best to keep looking, even if I don’t know what it is, exactly, I am looking for.
Here are some things I have found: There are red berries everywhere along the bike path, strung together like beads on a necklace. There is ice in the belly of an old, abandoned dory tied up at the F Street Pier in Madaket. There are migratory birds, stopping here as they continue on to their winter homes further south. And there is Orion, who is lost in the glare of summer, but now commands the sky.
On Sunday, the island woke up to see our world covered in snow. I am still not sure I can pinpoint a smell, but I love the sound of it, or, rather, how snow dampens all sound. Our little world looks different.
I drove around in my pickup truck—grateful I’d be leaving behind that unsafe old car that didn’t want to start in 2025, grateful for 4-wheel drive—checking in on a few buildings. Their sagging roofs, their peeling paint, their scraggly shingles had all been transformed by the snow. Maybe the rest of us would be, too.
