I don't know what it is about falling snowflakes that makes silence sound so good, but it's always been crazy to me that a flurry of those little things can create such stillness.
When I was a kid, my mom and I would often drive north on Friday nights to spend the weekend escaping the world by skiing. Well, she'd ski and I'd snowboard. But those car rides were always done in the dark, and my favorites were the ones where it'd been snowing.
Winding our way through Vermont's backroads, snowflakes fluttering in from the darkness beyond the high-beams, I always felt like I was in Star Wars—launching into lightspeed aboard the Millennium Falcon. Smooth by Santana would come on again, but we'd still sing like it was the first time.
Those late Fridays meant early Saturdays. That's because we'd hustle to get out the door and to the mountain in time for fresh tracks. As busy as the lift lines might be and as much energy as the chairlift conversations would carry, I'd find pure, unperturbed silence when I'd cut into the woods. That's where, in the hazy gray daylight, I'd look up. My breath would coil skyward while those fat flakes fell down. I'd exhale and follow the spiral as high as I could before losing it in the clouds. Then, I'd pick one flake and follow its path all the way to the ground.
Today, while shoveling the driveway, I did the same damned thing in the still-falling snow. And then I laughed, hard, realizing that I'll always be a kid looking for the sound of silence from those flakes.
Where do you find pockets of silence while the world keeps bustling on?
onward.
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