The Smell of Snow
By LISA SHATFORD

There's a scent in September coincident with the first ski magazines and the three red, wrinkled leaves in your backyard and the yearning in your feet. It gets heavier as the days shorten into the spooky evening when your son dresses up as Bode and no one in your Canadian neighborhood knows who he is, but they like the attitude and they know a winner when they see one. The smell is thick and rich and ephemeral.

For every mile on the treadmill and downbeat from Spearhead there is a knot of crystal anticipation that hovers just below your breastbone waiting to divide you into two—your summer self and the other person who is weightless. Your toes curl into the new footbeds that you delayed for so long because you couldn't say goodbye to the old ones, but now you feel the strength in your arches and the color of your conscience as the music lifts you to a loftier location.

There isn't a whisper that doesn't point to a falling and a lifting that you know will take you back to a sharp and feathered place. Funny that the physicists haven't explained how things can be heavy and light all at once, or cold and warm at the same time. Like snow and your heart. The ebbing of one good thing into the unfolding of a better one will never be grasped by anyone who hasn't stood at the top of Baldy and smelled it.

Last spring after seven years of "I'm too cold" local-hill tears, you finally took your son to the Mountains. He held his skis over his head on the glacier, smiling for the camera, and now you are truly a family, just you and him, with a clandestine language cemented by airplane snacks and friendly rugged mountain men who give him high fives on the Peak Chair and inaugurate him grandly into the best secret society.

Now he smells it too. You can see the hairs sticking up on his neck when you sign the lease for the winter rental. This one has enough room for the Christmas tree that will hold your entire collection of ski cockles and whistles. It has the hope of a million runs out of purgatory to a heavenly basin. The same hope that broadens each October into a panoramic wish for the snow on Mt. Mansfield to lay down and stick.

To know that another winter will give you a gold mine is all you could ever ask, and while you reach for ways to repay the gift, you know you won't find a fair trade. So you surrender to the treasure that your own father nurtured for all of those years of rope tows and too-tight boots and you open your woolen mittens to the elevated transport that every different flake on the driveway moves you toward, knowing they will lift you in their seasonal way.


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