Category: Magic

I’ve been holding off on this post, mostly because I don’t want to be the seasonal blogger, who gets inspiration to write solely from changes in the atmosphere. Does nothing else touch me, affect me, move me enough to get off my passivity and actually pen down my thoughts and impressions on this forum? But you see, while normal inspiration comes from little anecdotes and events in the blogger’s life, weather is something external, something beyond our control, and if that much raw power isn’t inspirational, well, what is? (Such rationalization!) Oh well, if weather ends up being my prime muse, so be it!

I heartily dislike the cold: arctic wind slipping through and caressing every bit of exposed skin with its long, frigid fingers, the wintry chill which permeates you with every icy breath you take, the sheer amount of layers you have to put on, even if you’re walking just three measly blocks to your destination. I feel miserable when my nose and tips of my ears freeze up – but that is nothing compared to frosty toes which I can’t even feel anymore, and am half-convinced that I’m going to pull off my socks only to reveal ten little blocks of ice. All of winter, I’m basically a popsicle in a pink coat.

I’ve always claimed that given a choice between living in the wintry depths of Siberia and the Death Valley in California, I wouldn’t even blink before picking the valley; how long I would survive in either is a whole different question.

However, no matter how cold the winter is, the moment it snows… I fall in love, all over again. Soft, quiet snow, drifting down all around you is somehow incredibly peaceful. It’s as if the snow cushions you in a cottony blanket and isolates you – from sound, from people, from your worries and turmoil. Because when you’re walking through the falling snow, you just exist, right there, in that beautiful moment suspended in time. The world is beautiful, dream-like, and leisurely. Instead of keeping my chin tucked into my scarf and striding along my way to hurry into the warmth of the indoors, I can linger, turn my face up to the sky to catch snowflakes on my eyelashes, and melt them on my tongue.

A soft cover of snow adds a sprinkle of magic to the mundane. In the immortal words of Roald Dahl, “watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you, because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it”. I believe that snow is one of the most likeliest of places to find that elusive magic, that spark, that little ember of wishful hopes and dreams and unfettered imagination which we all had in abundance as children, but that which we convince ourselves, with the advent of age and responsibility, is fanciful, unrealistic and ridiculously naive. However, if you put all of these hardened, cynical adults into oodles of piled-up snow, you can sit back and witness the magic – watch them morph back into the children they once were: making snowmen, women and angels, skiing through Central Park, clobbering each other with Quaffle-sized balls of snow (yes, I’m a lot more familiar with Quidditch than say, football – or is it soccer?), gleefully snowboarding through the inconceivably traffic-free streets of Manhattan, and most importantly, laughing with abandon. It’s a sight to behold – the carefree joy, the profound happiness. When it snows, it reminds us just a little bit of the children we once were, of the magic we once believed in.

And that momentary reminder is enough to keep me warm through the bitterest of winters.