Snow

A pure white hush has fallen over the city. Cars slow, lights sparkle, and sound is noticeably absent. Perhaps the reason I love snow is the quiet it brings to a place that is often much too loud.



Charlotte once was a quiet place, a place where stores were closed on Sunday, and the only sound you would hear before 7AM was that of song birds.

Now, when it snows if only for a brief moment the silence returns. Only the sound of falling snow flakes and a winter's wind. It surrounds my soul and comforts my heart.

Snow in Charlotte brings panic to most Southerners and disaster to some, yet to me its a welcome respite from the normal dullness of a Carolina winter. It never lasts long and since our Carolina Spring is only a few weeks away, I have no fear, and no need to rush it away. Which may explain why Southerners never shovel their driveways and why we build snowmen, they are the last sentries to fall when the sun returns often on the same day of a morning snow.

I listen to the pines and the wind sings a song of cold and ice. It eases and then swirls around the backside of my home and down the golf course fairway to the creek that lies just beyond the flood lights.

Its more than an hour before dawn and the snow is coming down in layers of cotton like softness. Now is the time I feel most alive, and in the wonder of it all there is no darkness as the snow brightens everything.



Within a hour of sunrise the golf course fairway behind and the street in front of my home will be alive with a children's joyous chorus of laughter, a day without rules, a day with snow.

And soon transplanted Yankees who brought snow shovels to their new southern homes will began clearing their driveways. A nerve jarring old habit, their metal shovels scrap across the concrete to remove less than an inch of snow. The echos of scrapping, banging, and grinding will continue until noon when at last every inch of what they consider, terrible white powder is removed. A snow free driveway is a sure sign of a northerner in a southern city.

But for now with coffee in hand and two black labs by my side the snow and the silence is mine and mine alone and it whispers peace.

First Kiss

She has been in my thoughts for as long as I can remember. And every once and a while even now so many years later she returns. You see when I was 13 she was my first kiss. The first time I ever got up the nerve to kiss a girl and the girl's name was Karen.

It didn't go really well and certainly not as I had planned.

The week of Christmas forever ago was filled with excitement. A ski trip, school out for two weeks and Christmas Caroling one night in the cold of a Chicago suburban winter.

From the 5th grade on Karen was my best friend. When my classmates played football I choose to hang out with Karen. Baseball, she always came to my games. We shared the same seat in the back of the bus everyday for as long as I can remember.

After school I would walk Karen home and we'd talk for hours till her mother got off work. She wasn't allowed to have boys in the house so it was a pretty strange arrangement, she'd sit inside the house and I sat outside on the steps, separated by a screen door.

Karen was a great tease. Karen's house was across the street, her bedroom and my bedroom faced each other. We flashed lights and opened and closed drapes signaling each other at all hours. She'd change her clothes in plain sight, but only after calling me to inform me of the pending event. Can't say I ever saw much as her bedroom window was nearly head high.

So it was after much thought, on that cold December night that I made my move. I pulled her aside and away from our group of caroling parents and kids and moved within inches of her lips our cold noses barley touching. She closed her eyes and didn't move. Then it happened. I kissed her.

Karen opened her eyes wide and jumped back nearly a half a mile. Grabbed a handful of snow and scrubbed her face as if I were a rabid dog. I was crushed.

We didn't speak to each other for weeks. But it didn't end there and soon we were off to High School were we remained as close as ever.

In the haze of my youth I remember going a bit father, kissing her through a screen door that I can still after all these years taste. Once she slept in my arms or pretended to sleep as my hands explored her shirt and everything under it, all the while our parents played bridge in the other room.

We often missed the bus together on purpose so we could walk the two miles home just to talk and be alone. In the warmth of a March afternoon as we walked along the street to our neighborhood something happened. The sun was bright and the air fresh, the soggy green grass contrasted with the still remaining piles of winter's snow.

She slipped on some ice and I grabbed her just in time. In a moment where time stood still we kissed and this time she didn't wash it off. At her home we started to kiss again but her mother drove up in her car, home early for some reason.

Two months later, my family moved. It was unexpected and sudden. Karen and I traded letters for the longest time. But one day I opened her letter tossed it aside and never wrote back. It wasn't anything she said; I had just discovered Becky whose parents never came home early.

I kept in touch with Karen over the years via the Christmas cards my parents received from her parents. 2 Years after my move to North Carolina her family did the same moving from the windy city to the far eastern part of the state.

She finished college and received a commission in the Air Force. Years later she married and had 2 children. Her father passed away one year. Last year in a fleeting conversation I understood my mother to say she thought she had divorced her husband of 15 years.

Every so often, on cold winter days I think of Karen. The wind blows through the tops of the trees that surround my home as traces of a recent snow fall lay melting in southern sunlight.

The hope and promise of a new spring is just around the corner and I quietly think of my first kiss and her name is Karen.