My grandmother saved bread bags
for slipping over our thick-socked feet,
the better to glide them into too-tight boots, boots
with yet another year, still, of good wear in them.

My mother kept a broom by the back porch door,
pending our snow-encrusted return, when we would
knock, and wait, and turn in our turn, submitting
to a fierce and thorough broom grooming.

Our first stop, always, was the kitchen sink,
where we ran our frost-red hands under
a cold-running tap, until the water stopped
its burning and our hands began to thaw.

Soggy jackets and stocking caps, snow pants,
scarves, and mittens covered every thin rib
of each downstairs room’s radiator, steaming
with the heat until all cold was forgotten,
and we donned them all again, warmly damp,
and got on our boots again,
and ran all out the door again,
to return to the glorious snow.

In those deep-snow days, if our Flexible Flyers
betrayed us, sinking to their runner tops
and stalling out in the drifts, there were walled forts
still to be built, all along the driveway snow banks,
tunnels to be dug, and caves to be discovered
under the bent boughs of bushes, or what might
once have been bushes, there at the yard’s
edges where those small and fluffy igloos stood.

A thick cluster of young saplings, bent long
and low by a load of snow almost impossible
to bear somehow had strength and sap enough
to endure my climbing and clambering up,
to sustain my solidly ascending weight,
and to hold me there, suspended, in a creaking,
rocking cradle of wood frame and white bedding
whose snow-down softness I sigh for, still.

There were snow angels to be made,
with the eternal dilemma of how to fly up
once we’d made our winged impression
and leave the heavenly image pure, unsmeared
by our earthly struggles to rise.

And there would always be more snow,
more swirls of snow falling, and I always
wanted to stay and make my home in those
low tunnels and caves whose blue-white silence
was worlds away from the noisy house
where the steaming, hissing radiators clanked
and banged, where my mother’s cross words
and worn looks had something to do, even I knew,
with the high cost of keeping those radiators steaming.

Outdoors it was so quiet, and felt so safe,
staying out late in those snowy nests, staying out maybe
even going on dark, with the slow snow still falling,
and I might lie down somewhere in the drifting softness,
upheld by the wide wings of my latest snow angel,
my eyes wide, too, to the many snowflakes I made believe
were now just still points of whiteness, standing still in the air,
while my angel and I flew up, without sound,
just so fast and so silent as a steady snow falling,
flying up towards the night-gray murky heaven
of snow-flecked sky above our heads.