International Women’s Day

The snow is falling in straight lines this morning, straight down. The sky is the softest of greys. The house next door, Irene's, which faces my window, is also a soft grey. Perhaps it is that wonderful shade known as gull grey, what you see if you can catch a glimpse in the fog of the back of a herring gull in flight. Appropriately, it has white trim, like the underside of the same gull illuminated against a blue sky.

The world outside is turning into a black and white photograph, subtle and elegant as a platinum print, while every pigment that is not on the grey scale gradually fades away. This is not a big shift for the paper birches and the dark shafts and branches of the shad and mountain ash. It is easy enough also for Irene’s house and for the soft grey sky. And it is easy for the falling flakes. Even the clustered long needles of the pines are getting loaded down with heavy white coats so that their thin lines of green are barely showing underneath, until it is only the scaly reddish trunks of the pines that stand firm in their statements of colour this snowy morning.

It seems like ideal snowman snow, good for packing, as long as the temperature holds and it doesn’t shift to rain. In my understanding, even on International Women’s Day, it is snowman snow, even if it is snowwomen we build when our granddaughters come by later. The problem for me is that terms like snowperson or snowpeople just don’t roll out as easily as snowman. I wish the word were gender neutral, because I do like its sound, just as I wish I could still say foot or mile, like the Americans can, smooth Anglo-Saxon root words that carry such a resonant monosyllabic feel and history, instead of metre and kilometer – these things just don’t scan, no matter how correct they are to use.

Perhaps an answer for this dilemma could be snowfolk, since it has the sound I need (even if a person might mishear it as slowpoke), so that what we have accumulating out there this morning, still pristine in our dooryard, is snowfolk snow. It lies there smooth and white on this quiet day waiting for the capable small hands of Anna and Ella to help us shape it into whatever folk they decide to make, girls or women, boys or men, in celebration of the day, which is their day, as it is all of ours.