Te Aute Crossroad S3 : E4

Let it snow

For my sister, Rosemary.

What do you think of this as the title for a wellbeing, self-help kind of paperback best-seller (in other words, something I and my keyboard just made up): ‘The Sub Memory’.

The Sub Memory (my book will take several hundred pages explaining this), is where we file memories from before we can actually remember stuff. These (what I call) sub-memories (I will write) are no more than elusive shadows, and yet they remain powerful and influence our feelings to this very day. (“To this very day”: you pick up on the fervent style I have in mind, don’t you?)

For instance, tomato soup. When I was maybe four, we were living in Adelaide, and my mother took me with her into the city. My sub-memory has not retained why we were there, but does give me a glimmer of walking through a park (there are parks all around the Adelaide CBD)…and our stopping for lunch at a tea rooms: you are beginning to understand how precious this sub-memory was to become. I don’t actually remember, but I know we had tomato soup. Because it was delicious and special…and to this very day tomato soup and I have a secret together: a relationship, a connection. Tomato soup, for me, has one of those hums they pick up with radio telescopes: a hum from the beginning of time¹.

And then there’s snow. In most places in Aotearoa New Zealand it rarely—if ever—snows. For most of us, therefore, growing up, snow was something that came on Christmas cards, or in those domes you shake and the ‘snow’ swirls about. Or in Christopher Robin stories: “Tracks,” said Piglet. “Paw-marks.” He gave a little squeak of excitement. And so, for many of us, snow is a sub-memory: something rare, and wonderful, and sublime. Tomato soup for the soul.

Our housewarming at The Brow was in December of 2002 and in July of 2003 (sister) Rosemary and Mike were back. It was winter, and the forecast wasn’t great, but we lit the fires, made a stew, and hunkered down.

Rosemary looked up from her book…It’s snowing! (and gave a little squeak of excitement). I smiled, as older brothers do, and pronounced—condescendingly—it won’t come to anything…

Tracks, said Piglet. Paw-marks.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. It snowed, and snowed, and snowed. The power went out. It was soon what someone at the Council would describe as The worst snow storm in forty years.

Silly Council man. Silly Old Bear. Worst? Nonsense! This was the BEST snow storm! In our whole lifetimes. Ever!

So quiet. Hushed. The silent, yet relentless, accumulation of snow on the ground; weighing down the branches of trees. The shifting calibration of the light, from colour to black-and-white. The only colour the glow from the fire in the lounge. The only sound—not even audible, but deeply resonating—the hum…of Pooh, from our sub-memories:

The more it snows, tiddely pom, the more it goes, tiddely pom, on snowing.

And nobody knows, tiddely Pom, how cold my toes, tiddely Pom

Are growing.

Magical.

In every adult, wrote author, John Connolly, there dwells the child that was.

Let it snow.

1. Cosmic microwave background radiation, thought to be a relic of the Big Bang. Apparently the Big Bang didn’t actually go ‘Bang!’…it just hummed.