Vermont Winter Snowstorm Magic
Vermont Winter Snowstorm Magic
By Felicia Neuhof
Woodstock Union High School, Grade 10
Millions of tiny flakes float down, waiting to find the one place they belong.
They are like a mother tucking her child into bed, and pulling a fluffy white sheet over her now still and slumbering child.
It covers every surface, casting its thick white spell that muffles surrounding sounds and cries, and mesmerizes every eye that invades its soundless mission.
Falling, falling, falling, every single flake coming together, rounding and smoothing every sharp, crude outline, and turning it into a beautiful, magical, and delicate wonderland, just waiting for someone to scuff its immaculate surface.
Now the flakes intensity starts to slow, transforming from a flaky sheet, yet turning into powdered sugar and sprinkling on the finishing touches of the long, restless storm.
All is now still in this created cotton candy snow globe, ready for the children, cozy in their Vermont homes with wood stoves keeping them warm and chimney coughing and puffing out smoke, to awake and peer out their windows and jump up into the air.
They rush to hectically don their snowsuits, hats, scarves, big boots, and mittens, and hurry out into the blinding white snow and make snowmen with their orange carrot noses, and black pebble eyes and mouths.
The children go zipping and gliding over the blankets of snow on their sleds, making a deeper path each time they go down, with snow spraying and voices happily screeching.
An accidental spray of snow turns into a wrestling match of king of the hill, or a craving for revenge in an all out snowball fight.
After growing up through countless Vermont winters, the children have built up a tolerance to the harsh cold of king winter’s breath and are able to stay out so much longer than any city children.
It is after hours of flurry fun that the fingers and toes of the children no longer have any feeling and with that cue they decide its time to go back inside their cozy warm houses for a hot cocoa, some blankets, and thawing in front of the blazing fire.
As the children slowly romp back through the fluffy snow, right…left…right…left, after hours of Vermont wintry play, the smiling sky ejects the last of its winter magic, and dusts another thing white sheet of crystals over the disturbed thick blanket recently marred by the rambunctious children.
The shaggy still trees that sit and sleep through the long storm, start waking one by one, and shaking off like a dog, the magical winter coat that tucks them, and the whole wide world, into a soft peaceful slumber.
To be a Vermonter in winter is like being an angel in heaven, they go hand in hand.
To know that there is a storm coming and hoping that the roads will be too snowed in for travel, wearing pajamas inside out in hopes of having a snow day, getting up extra early to the bluish tint of your room from the surrounding snow outside and rushing to the radio to see which schools are closed for the day these are the things that as a Vermont child I live for.
What makes Vermont the most important in my eyes is the magic that can be made in the simplicity of mother nature’s snowstorm and the ways that everyone reacts in joy to its arrival.