First Snow Experience

Today my good friend and tandem Tatjana gave me a ride to the Madrilean mountains to see actual snow for the first time, touch it, smell it, experience what it is like with all my physical senses. Snow is beautiful, snow is magical and snow is a blast, but the surreality of a whole landscape covered with a white that could be shampoo foam, salt or sand is an experience which, much like the all-sweeping tropical rainstorm followed by an aethereal rainbow, should be in everybody's memory, all over the world.

I grew up visiting the Sea very often, and I am quite disturbed by the fact that many people die everyday without having ever seen the Sea live. Resting your eyes on an infinitely faraway, blue horizon that blurs and blends with the Sky is a function of life, and I honestly feel injustice and hurt feelings when older people tell me they've never seen the Sea. Likewise, it is an injustice that my grandparents died without having ever seen the Snow.

Common to all sassy-dressed snowboarders, euphoric kids in their sleds, cool Europeans (and immigrants) having a mug of hot chocolate with picatostes in a warm, wooden room and by a window showing a white, white vista is definetely a reverence for this yearly miracle of Nature. Snow is Her way of saying "it's all under my protection now. My white Mantle will keep the land nourished, silent and ready, while the mead brews. Beneath my white Mantle lives a promise". And She ain't telling anything until Spring breaks, which is of course just as well.

Missing this important, reassuring time of the year is a shame.




Image: my first snowball. I didn't have the gloves to make a real snowman, but one day.