Snow in St. John's

This is adapted from a journal entry I wrote on February 28, 2018.

It snowed yesterday for about seventeen hours straight, the first serious snow we've had this winter. (It's been unseasonably warm.) But this morning when I woke up the flakes had stopped coming down. Because of my attempts to correct my sleep inversion, I managed to be awake for all of it. I'm shifting my sleep schedule forward three hours at a time, and on this particular day I woke up at midnight and stayed awake until five. The flakes were falling thick and fast that whole time.

(I felt a bit like Gilgamesh, tasked to stay awake. Like it was an enchantment, and as long as I could keep my eyes open the snow would keep falling - soft and magical, and perfect.)

But I couldn't stay up. I was nearly cross-eyed after being awake that long, not to mention having done eight hours of transcribing work for my graduate assistantship. I'm not supposed to tell anyone about the contents of the interviews, but I'll be vague here: there was a part of this interview with a woman from Eastern Europe who came to Canada to work after university and just settled here afterward. She was talking about returning to the country of her birth and how it wasn't really home, how she doesn't belong there but she doesn't have roots in this new country either. "I don't really think I know what home is anymore," she said at one point. "That's something I won't ever know again."

With snow falling down outside the window, and this woman's words echoing in my head, I fell asleep that "night" and woke at three the next morning feeling a bit too much cabin fever to stay still. So when it grew light out I went out to wait for a bus so I could go to the mall, walk around indoors a bit, and maybe watch a movie.

It was foggy out, and chill, but not nearly as cold as I'd hoped. The snow piled high, high, high on either side of the road, so I was forced to walk through the remnants left behind by the snowplows  - that velvety brown mush that splats to liquid beneath your boot tread. The house behind the bus stop on Merrymeeting Road had these enormous icicles hanging down from the porch roof, drip-drip-dripping. But I climbed the pure white mountain next to the pole with the bus flag and stood waiting. It's a Rule of the Universe that I'm always either ten minutes early or thirty seconds too late for a bus. Fortunately that day was the former.

(I forget a lot, you know. I forget it constantly, that the sea is right there. Only a few days before this I'd been up overnight with my usual sleep inversion nonsense and realized I could take a walk outside and catch the sunrise, so I walked down a block or two, past the Sobeys grocery store and the Rooms museum, and I found the perfect spot atop this little hill, and I watched the sun come up, and it was such a surprise even then to realized that the glitter in the rosy light was water, and there were boats gliding across the harbour in that orange glow of daybreak.)

But today, in the snow, there was nothing there to remind me. It was cold and white and still like the world is after a snowfall. Even the people who were up and about seemed subdued, caught under its spell. And that's a world, a moment, a circumstance where I might expect to smell pine trees or wood smoke, or maybe mountain-type smells. But I was standing there looking toward the east, because that's the direction the bus comes from, and I smelled it. Not any of those things. I smelled the sea.

It's not a smell you can mistake for anything else. Nothing compares. (Cue Sineád O'Connor.) But seriously. I know that smell. I have a hundred happy memories linked with it - this same sea, glimpsed in Cape Cod or Topsail Island or Cherry Grove or Daytona Beach. I've smelled that smell most often in summertime, with sun beating down overhead, a warm prickle on the skin. I've smelled that smell with sand stuck to my legs. With sunsets and beach chairs, star-gazing and shell-gathering. While watching the waves smooth away castles and messages sculpted from sand. I know that smell like I know my childhood phone number, and the way it feels to hug my mom and dad, and the exact layout of the bookstore where I used to work that doesn't even exist anymore.

But I've never in my life experienced that familiar scent in this way. Standing up to my knees in perfect, pristine snow, surrounded by fog, listening of the plink of icicles behind me, as a bit of wind gusts full in my face and I smell the whole of it, that big, vast, immeasurable mystery, and I remember. The ocean. It's here.

It was the weirdest, most wondrous realization.

Two worlds crashing together, yet making not a sound.