Title.

Falling Snow             


     Middle school. How I hated middle school. Teachers hated me because I asked questions that weren’t in their rubric. They didn’t know what to do with me. I was bored, but too lazy to excel with advanced work.            

     The kids hated me. I was weird. I’ll admit that. I liked books and didn’t want to try to rip my arm out of its socket playing Red Rover. I also didn’t want to see how far I could rocket myself off the swing set at high speed, or even sit on the steps and make origami fortune tellers while giggling about boys. I didn’t have marbles, or a jump rope, and the school fads all passed right by me without making an impression. No, kids pretty much didn’t know what to do with me, and the feeling was mutual.           

     Middle school was all about the mundane. Snow. What’s more mundane than snow, especially in New England? Every year, it happens, and adults are annoyed by it and kids love it, but it’s nothing new. In middle school we had a science experiment one day when it was snowing. Our teacher took us outside with little boxes filled with microscope slides sprayed with plastic coating to catch a suitable snowflake for examination.            

     We were given twenty minutes for this task. Twenty minutes to find a suitable snowflake.           

     Most of the kids spent their twenty minutes running around like idiots in the snow, trying to catch snowflakes on their tongue instead of their slides, soaking the hem of their jeans, throwing the odd snowball when they thought they could get away with it. This was the teacher’s plan, to let us run off energy in the name of science. A few of them got right to work, rushing over to the teacher every three seconds to get their opinion on whether this or that snowflake was suitable enough.            

     I was an observer back then, too, of course. It’s something you are or are not. You don’t grow into it, wake up and decide to watch things. I had five slides, and I took it upon myself to get exactly ten snowflakes for each slide. I wasn’t picky about the ones I got.           

     The rest of the kids caught a couple on their slides and brought them inside to look at under the microscope. The microscope belonged to the teacher. We didn’t have one in the classroom. I remember because I wanted to look at all five of my slides, but there wasn’t enough time, since we were all sharing.            

     We compared our snowflakes. Or really, the mold left in the spray by the melted snowflake. The echo of a snowflake. Each a perfect, six-sided crystallized water molecule.            

     Not an unsuitable one in the bunch.           

     That’s all I really remember about that snowflake preservation project, except that Joey Marsden took the opportunity when we were outside to give me a whitewash, tackling me and pushing my face into the dirty snow bank until my face was red and tingling. Some girl told me later that it was because he liked me. I was frankly more interested in the snow.                                                           

                                                           ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~           

     Which was probably when it started, now that I think about it. My classmates started calling me a lesbian. Not in that word, of course, not then. If they did, I didn’t know what they meant. It was probably more along the lines of, “She doesn’t like boys.”           

     Which I didn’t. And I’ll admit I did have a small sexual identity crisis in high school. Until then I thought the concept of questioning your orientation a little weird. Either you’re attracted to boys or you’re attracted to girls. The problem was that I didn’t seem to be attracted to either. Boys did nothing for me. I looked carefully at girls and realized that they didn’t do anything for me either.            

     I settled for a life of asexuality, viewing life through my camera instead of living it directly. It was high school, though, and all they knew was that I was different. The lesbian label stuck for a while. They didn’t even really think that I was gay. I was just queer, and that’s a different thing all together.

      I drifted through high school, taking pictures for the school paper and yearbook committee so that I’d have an excuse to point the camera at my classmates. They were always torn between running away from the weirdo and knowing that I was their ticket to high school immortality. I was more amused with their attitude than anything else, as unlikely as it sounds. Middle school lessons are hard to shake. I had learned my lesson from the snowflakes.           

     Different is unique. Unique is beautiful.           

     There is no such thing as an unsuitable snowflake.           

     People think that it must be a sort of fabrication on my part. There’s no way that I could be comfortable in my own skin being a high school outcast.            

     There were days it got annoying, I’ll say that. But I wasn’t really picked on so much as I was ignored. The worst thing anyone did to me was whisper about me behind my back, which wasn’t so horrible. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but hateful rhetoric is laughable when tripped from flippant lips.           

     Or something like that.

                                                          ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~           

     It’s quiet on the lake, which is why I decided to buy my first house here, even though I’m probably at least forty years younger than anyone in walking distance. I bought the house from an older woman who needed to move into assisted living. It’s not a large house, but it’s right on the water, with a nice view, so I paid more than I should have, considering the space.            

     In the winter, the lake gets even emptier, as many people choose to winter elsewhere in their old age, but strangely there seems to be more activity than in the summer out on the ice. People who don’t live on the lake travel out to make use of the largest body of frozen water in town.            

     And I watch them through my window. It is what I do, become the observer of small human history. I’m a photographer for a small town newspaper in reality, but I like my description better. Nothing that happens out my window will probably imprint itself onto the memory of the world. Indeed, many times people will find that this day or event will blend into other winter days until they cannot distinguish them. Most of what happens will not imprint itself upon the memory of the people living it.            

     Sometimes, the paper will have me come out to the lake on a slow news day and take a picture of three generations of men out ice fishing for purposes of filler and fluff, or sometimes something really exciting will happen and a snowmobile will break through the ice somewhere on the rim of the lake. I always take the picture facing away from my house, even if it’s a bad angle and the sun is in the way. I don’t like the idea of people looking into my life. I like taking pictures on the lake, though. It gives people something to talk about for awhile when they tell their remember whens.            

     “Remember when we went ice fishing that time?”

     “And we got our pictures in the paper. Yeah, I remember that.”           

     And the mundane small human history becomes an actual memorable event, and I facilitated it. The power of the snap of the camera lens.            

    Of course, it’s still not really news. No one will remember it in history. It’s not going to be one of the top ten stories of the year. It’s a small town. Not a lot of news. There are a lot of fluff pieces in my career.

                                                     ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

      When I moved out on my own for the first time, my mother suggested that I get a pet to keep me company. I ended up getting a cat. The cat is also pretty solitary, and we mostly leave each other alone. I feed it, and it occasionally comes by for a stroking.           

     That’s my days. I work, I come home, and I feed the cat, whom I’ve had for three years but haven’t bothered to name. And, astonishingly enough, occasionally I get a visit from a man that I attend the odd photography class with. We’re friends, of a sort. Lovers, of a kind. I pretend he’s my odd social experiment. The lone female approaches the male in a mating ritual. Which is not strictly true, because I never approached him. He approached me, of course.

      He told me my pictures were beautiful, but he was looking at me when he said it. I told him he had overly large pupils. Large pupils are supposed to be arousing. He laughed and said I was funny.

      No one had ever told me I was funny before. I was smug about it for days afterward. Every time he complimented me, I glowed. Which made me realize that, for quite possibly the fist time in my life, I was attracted to a man.

      I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next, never having been in this type of situation before. I was attracted – that didn’t mean that he was. I deliberated for days over this issue; dissecting the signals he was sending, calculating the odds that he might be interested. Then I told myself that I was being stupid and juvenile and I invited him over after class for coffee.

      His name is Wheeler, which sounds like a more suitable name for the cat than another human being. It’s a boy’s nickname, which suits him. He’s very boyishly handsome, all freckles and a charming smile.

      Somewhere around our fifth date, I took Wheeler home and allowed him to have sex with me. I’m not entirely sure why, other than I did enjoy him and wanted to keep him around for a while longer. I enjoy the company more than the sex, which I could do without, but according to everything that I’ve ever read or heard about, men can not and will not forgo, even in exchange for scintillating conversation. I was a virgin then, for our first time, but I didn’t tell him that.            

     I don’t mean to place blame on him or anything. He didn’t put any pressure on me about the issue. He was exceedingly gentle and tender that first time, and has been equally so since then. And perhaps I was trying it out, myself. I thought that perhaps the act of sex might miraculously awaken feelings of passion and desire such as have never entered my body before.

      In some ways it did. I’ve never had as intense a desire to photograph someone as I do with Wheeler. I could do an entire series on his freckles.

      His freckles are absolutely everywhere. I enjoy them immensely, actually. He once let me play connect the dots on his back with a soft-tip pen. I drew fantastical constellations, swirls, dips, and the odd irregular shape. Occasionally, I would plot out a likely route with the barest tip of my nails, raising goose bumps across the expanse of his back.            

     I took pictures of it afterward. Wheeler’s strong back, with my marks. I made him hold perfectly still while I took almost an entire roll. The small of his back, with its little cluster of freckles. The shoulder blades. The center dip of his curving spine. I traced my little designs. Beautiful, beautiful, boyish Wheeler, with the strong back of a man. Click, click, click, went the camera, until Wheeler rolled over. “Stop teasing me,” he said, pupils large and dark. I hadn’t known I was.

      We made love afterwards and he sweated most of them off. The sheets were a mess. I was glad I had taken the picture beforehand. Most of the designs were indistinguishable afterward. 

      It’s about the closest we’ve come to sexual games. I’m entirely vanilla in pretty much every aspect of my life, so it’s not so much a surprise to find it to be true in that respect as well.            

Wheeler’s uncomplicated and literary. He’s quiet. He doesn’t push me. I don’t know if that’s a blessing or a curse. He’s probably a good match for me. I’m not going to find anyone that matches me more closely, not in this lifetime. He’s enjoyable.

      We have a relatively healthy sex life, from what I know of such things. I have affection for him, surely, but my understanding is that in this type of relationship there is generally something else there to keep a standing interest. He’s a good friend, a generous lover, but I would frankly miss the cat more than I would miss him. It’s a future reflex action, me preparing myself for the inevitable end of this relationship. Even if he’s not at this very moment, there will come a day when Wheeler puts some kind of demand upon me that I’m not ready to answer. Marriage, children, moving in, going out. Eventually he’ll want, need, demand, that I feel passion. That I feel something. I won’t be able to give it to him.           

     I don’t know as I’ve ever felt passion before when I wasn’t behind a camera lens, so it’s not his fault.

                                                          ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

      It’s snowing today, hard enough that school has been canceled. The poor middle schoolers will have to wait until another day to learn how to preserve snowflakes, if they still teach that sort of thing. They probably do. Nothing that useless is ever done away with.

      I like to be by myself when it snows. When Wheeler is with me, he often wants to go out on the lake and enjoy the snow with everyone else. I like to stay at my window like the solitary spinster I’m likely to be in another fifty years.           

     New snow is prime people watching time. People drag themselves out to the lake with their many winter lake accoutrements. We have snowmobiles and ice fishing, plus kids taking advantage of a snow day to come out and skate.            

     There’s a group of boys trying to get a hockey game going. They have to stop their game every once in a while to clear new-fallen snow off of their rink. They don’t seem to mind the extra work, for all that they’ll be complaining later in the day when the same chore is applied to their mother’s walkways. Ice fishermen set up huts to try to stay out of the wind. They come out sometimes when it snows for the sociability of it all. The colder it is and the wetter and more miserable they are, the more fun they’re having.           

     Minor human events, reveling in a natural phenomenon that humans conquered years ago with home heating.            

     I press my hand to the glass in front of me. The frost causes the window pane to leak heat like a sieve, seeping into my hand and making it tingle. When I remove my hand, I see its outline, not only in the fogged glass, but in the melted frost outside. Even when I let out a breath close enough to the glass for it to fog, there is hardly a difference, the pane is already so white from the drifted snow.            

     It’s as if the spray frost that I put on for Christmas has suddenly reappeared with a vengeance. This frost, though, spreads and trips up the glass, in a pattern that escapes me before I can put a name to it. One moment they are dolphins leaping through the white foam of the sea, and then they are wispy spider webs creeping up the glass. The house is warm, but standing next to the window, I feel as though I’m outside in the storm itself.