Snowfall reminds me of smoking cigarettes. Me and four boys huddled close in the barren copse, down Bunker Hill ’round the rooted corner covered in gray slush and slipsign and butts and beer caps and half-burnt sticks from summer, to get a brief pass and puff of the glorious stolen stuff. My mom smoked menthols and was easy to steal from (later she’d had enough of presumptuous kids taking her packs willy-nilly and would find ways to buy by the carton and share the wealth) and we were young, stupid, and often in love. Menthols have a distinctive hit that feels better in the cold, long drags of January air. “don’t take too long” “you got axe” “wanna see a dead body” I don’t know if we knew how inane we sounded, how stupid it was to come home in a thick haze of Dollar Store body spray and terror. The architecture of our souls was ill-formed but coalescing. We found a Christ-like solemnity in watching the frozen river for its flow; in daring to step on the frozen concrete blocks they sunk to limit the creek’s flooding; in the half-whispered rumors of who smoked weed, and whose dad got into fights, and who still pissed themselves at night.
The first time I smoked I coughed up a bit of blood-red and right there on the snow, quickly buried with a dash of boot. The pinkish hue was left undisturbed, a signifier of childish fragility layered with degrees of untold remembrance (my father smoked, my mother smoked, my grandfather smoked, my grandfather smoked, my grandmother smoked, my grandmother smoked—all this, too, was a kind of memory it seemed). When we huddled back together my face was redder and my cheeks tear soaked. I couldn’t speak but they didn’t want me to and I worried I’d left some blood on the filter tip. They drew it in, nonetheless. That’s when I first began, spirit and soul, to believe that all men are brothers, and that we had now ascended, bare-chinned and squeaking into the holy garden of our elders (what luck, it takes blood, heavy cost sweat, and nicotine).
The next winter we were back—this time willing to step unsteadily onto the icy floes and whip snowballs at each other, hard. In the face. Often inaccurately. Our number had winnowed from five to three (one moved to the next school district, still parts unknown, the other found another smoking spot). By that time, our interest in girls and boys was more than a hypothetical—and menthols became crushes with the first blush of real cash in our hands. Habits are expensive, but produce an inelible and inexplicable place for live. It’s a common phrase that in wintertime things die—time stops—nothing changes until the unexpected revelry of lively green shoots its tender brancehs forth in the brown-gray nothingness of slush. Death is an expectant form of life—fitting somewhere between the ashy decay of mintsmoke and snowfall.
Snowfall of cigarettes close in barren cover slip from summer to a brief often—Love, a distinctive hit that feels better in the cold—see, sound how terror, the architecture of our souls found a Christ-like solemnity in the half whispered rumors coughed up of blood. Red and tight, there undisturbed. Fragility was a kind of memory, redder and worried that all men are brothers bare-chinned and squeaking into that holy unsteady. Our number winnowed, one unknown other. Our interest became crushes produce an indelible and inexplicable place for love. It’s common that, in time, things die. The unexpected revelry of live branches forth —Nothingness expectant, flitting snowfall.▲
