A Reykjavík Snowfall
When snow falls, the world changes. You turn your eyes upward. Your sense of space takes on an additional dimension, for suddenly the skies overhead are breathing. The weather envelops you, subsumes you. You are held by something greater than yourself. There is you, and there is the whiteness all around. The snow covers up, and goes on covering up, like cloth accumulating on a loom, until the landscape is made new.
In winter, there seems to be more snow in Iceland than ice. It blankets the distant mountains. It lingers on rooftops. It melts before appearing again. Snowfall becomes a companion — the refrain of one’s life.
Perhaps, in Iceland, the opposite of night is not day, but snow: it is the necessary antidote to the dark. In painting every surface white, it equalizes all things. The brightness wakes you up. It calls you out into the world. While the night washes away the past, the snow maintains it: your boots make prints you can follow again. You peer outside to see a dozen other trails — tracings of lives that are not your own.
On the night of my arrival, my friend J. and I left a house past midnight. Outside, the rain had turned to snow. Large, wet flakes spun gossamer cocoons around our bodies. As we ambled towards Hallgrímskirkja, Reykjavík’s towering, grey church, the only sound was that of our feet crunching on fresh powder. I was home.
