Ah, the crisp winter air. The snow. The cold. We've just had two snowfalls in a row, which I suppose is not typical of every Oregon winter. It reminds me that I haven't been truly snowed on since I lived in Philadelphia. The other night before it snowed, when it was just 28 degrees and dry, I took the dog for a walk, thinking that the local dog park/mud bowl would have frozen over. It had, and thankfully there was very little on the way of dog-cleaning that I needed to take care of.

As we were walking to the frozen mud bowl I heard a sound that distinctly reminded me of my winters back east. Below a certain temperature, the nylon shell of my coat freezes enough to lose some of its suppleness and begins to crinkle instead of rustle. The change in the quality of sound coupled with the near-silence of the street at midnight brought back memories of being thousands of miles from home. I remember the kind of winter that's so cold you know it'll take at least two years to get used to it. I remember thinking that I had a good warm winter jacket, freezing my ass off in it, and I remember making my friends take me out to the store to buy a new one that would fit the bill for a Philadelphia winter, not a Willamette valley winter.

There was a storm the winter of 1996 that laid feet of snow over the Philadelphia area, closing the airport and delaying my return from Christmas break for five glorious days. The city was wonderfully quiet during this time; even the manically active city dwellers knew when to stay in. Coming back to my apartment on Green Street, I had to climb a bank of snow just to get to my stoop. I took a picture a few days later, with the snow still piled high around the cars. I literally had to trudge through that snow to get to school. I think I actually enjoyed it, Philly covered in clean white snow, burying the rubble and the hundreds of years of dirt and grime. City Hall at the center of the city looks like a Gotham masterpiece when it's like this.

The first snow of the season is always so beautiful and pristine that it makes you just stop and gaze at it. Now that it's been around for a day or two, now that I have to get my ass to work in the morning, now that I've shovelled hundreds of pounds of snow off my driveway, I remember the truth about a snowy cold winter: that it's just another season, that it's a hazard and an inconvenience, and like my four years in Philadelphia, it's best enjoyed in retrospect.