Ou Sont Les Neiges d’Antan? A Winter’s Tale of Snow, Humility and Freezer Bags
By Robin Ford Wallace
The beginning of January’s snowstorm found your narrator gazing with a beatific smile at the wintry landscape that lay white and unblemished beyond her window. Her work completed, her house clean, her sole company the man she loved, she allowed a note of complacence to creep into her voice as she opined:
“Ah, how peaceful! What harm could we humans do each other if snow kept us always so quiet within our homes?”
Several days later, as your narrator packed the man she loved into many small freezer bags to elude detection and, if necessary, to supplement the stores of food she had laid in during raids on the homes of newly deceased neighbors, she realized she had at least partially answered a question meant to be rhetorical.
OK. Not really.
Yes, I had a serious case of cabin fever but no, I didn’t kill anybody, though I must say it was touch and go for a few days there. A week is a long time to be snowbound in the deep country with a man who owns a new drum.
Anyway, shortly after the storm I asked my sister Laura another rhetorical question: “I wonder,” I said, “how many marriages this dastardly blizzard has destroyed.”
And she said: “Eight.”
See, Laura works for a divorce attorney and eight is the number of new cases that called in when the world had thawed enough to reopen the office. That’s in one small Georgia town but if you multiplied it out across the Southeast you would probably find that that week of snow caused an exponential decrease in marital affection, an inverse spike in the income of divorce attorneys, and God only knows what kind of run on freezer bags.
I say “week” but in my case it was rather longer. Since we seem to be answering rhetorical questions today here’s another, from a famous old poem by the Frenchman Francois Villon: “Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
(To which the man I love would reply: “In my pants.”
It’s his primary joke. Virtually all questions can be answered “in my pants,” and it’s hysterically funny for the first couple of decades. “All right, buster, where’s the fire?” “Can you see anything?” “Do you love me?” Try some yourself, though I wouldn’t do it during a snowstorm.)
In any case, the answer I had in mind to Monsieur Villon’s question was: in my driveway. Long after the wintry landscape beyond my windows had melted into a nasty brown tableau of mud and tire ruts, the cypress trees shading our long, perilously precipitous driveway kept it as white and unblemished as Everest, while at the top I twitched and slobbered and counted out freezer bags.
I was bored and desperate and that’s probably why I got interested in the astrological news I read online: The Zodiac had slipped. Because of the moon's gravitational pull on the earth, or something, many of us who had gone through our lives as one sign suddenly had to get used to being another.
That was fine with me. My birthday is in early August and I get seriously sick of reading:
“Leo lady, you are a true lioness, fearless, proud, generous to fault – a natural leader!”
Me?
No way. I’m petty, sullen and afraid of practically everything, including basements. And leadership? If I were in a crowded theater, noticed it was on fire and shouted, “Run,” people would just sit there and burn to death. My dog doesn’t come when I call!
A more believable description of me would say something like: “You are touchy, resentful, deeply neurotic. Probably even your mother dislikes you. Stay away from automatic weapons, and avoid thinking too hard about freezer bags.”
The literature for my “new” sign, Cancer the Crab, doesn’t go quite that far, but it does include terms like “easily offended,” “mood swings,” and “prone to insecurity.” Yes! I’m home! I’m a crab, humping along sideways cussing over my shoulder. As T.S. Eliot wrote, “I should have been a pair of ragged claws, scuttling across the floor of silent seas.”
Entertained, I kept surfing the Net until I found a site registering reaction to the new Zodiac. Not everybody was as happy as I was. One guy had written:
“Ain’t no Aqueous! Born a Pieces, lived a Pieces, going to die a Pieces! Don’t know nothing about no Aqueous!”
That made me thrash around on the floor laughing. Here was this idiot who believed his life was controlled by mysterious astrological forces when he was too stupid even to spell them.
Then suddenly I stopped laughing. Because there I was, stuck at the top of an icy hill at the anal end of forever, rolling on the rug like an inbreed and having inappropriate thoughts about freezer bags, all alone in an infinite universe except for somebody who kept beating a drum and saying “in my pants.” Barking mad, and all because: it had snowed.
So the lesson I took from the snowstorm was humility. There is no place for complacence in a world where roofs cave in and marriages fail not only from mysterious astrological influences but from simple meteorology. Like my old granny used to say, there is nothing like a blizzard to make you feel like a helpless pawn buffeted by incomprehensible galactic forces.
So, duly chastened, we conclude with your narrator gazing out at the winterscape beyond her window and asking wistfully, “Ah, will it ever be warm again?”
It is a rhetorical question, Gentle Reader, and if you answer “in my pants,” I may have a freezer bag with your name on it.
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