In a Word
Snow, whether you love or hate the stuff, is a word that on its own seems innocent enough. But when conjoined as “snow in October,” as it was for Northeasterners this past weekend, it can morph into a terrifying prospect, evoke more shuddering than any Halloween ghosty goblin might. Typically, any forecast of a major Northeastern storm prompts some shivery conjuring: of tree damage and power outages, airport nightmares and impossible commutes. But snow in October? Before all the trees have lost their colorful canopies, before gardens have been cut back, deer fences erected around the rhododendrons? Before mowers are stowed and blowers gassed? Before treat bags are filled and candy shelves sacked? It’s an unjust trick without a treat.
As it turns out, save for some nasty winds attempting their usual mischiefs, the island was spared the significant accumulations that had been predicted for it yesterday. Still, such an outcome is unlikely to quell the notion that even a trace amount of snow in October foretells nothing other than a winter longer and worse than the last. I, a native Midwesterner, relate. Prepared-then-spared offers only momentary relief, a temporary reprieve. Blustery November is, after all, beating at the door. And though I’m back in Chicago where yesterday we enjoyed copious sunshine, 50 degrees and a final blast of oak russet and maple orange, I, too, waited in anticipation. The day before, I may have just rediscovered and again paused to admire Shakespeare’s “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang….” but yesterday in spirit I was closer to New Englander Robert Frost whose woods on a snowy evening are “lovely, dark and deep.”
In fact, as I sat down with a new book, thoughts of a potential snowstorm walloping the island were very much with me. But unlike a window’s frosted pane that, understandably in January (not October), can obscure what we see, the early storm’s forecasted imminence seemed more like a filtering focus as I skimmed the Table of Contents for Molly McQuade’s anthology, One Word: Contemporary Writers On The Words They Love or Loathe.
No, no writer had chosen the word snow. Nor was there a snowstorm or blizzard in the lot. Gray jumped out at me. The clouded over, socked in color, its seeming rightness with snow. Or the way a certain winter gray can portend snow, if in its company the air has a metallic bite. Needless to say, thermostat grabbed my attention and not only because of the oddity of its being a chosen word. A thermostat? But how convincingly Michael Martone writes of touching it every day, “a secular mezuzah at the threshold of climate change.” Or at the abrupt collapse of autumn.
And then there was forget. Ah, to forget even if not to forgive. The forgetting of the big and the small, the serious and not so, of the names of things, of the things themselves, once, back in a life-time you almost forget is yours. What you want to forget, can’t forget, can’t wait to forget. Like, perhaps, let’s just say, the Snowstorm of….
I paused at the word still. As in still snowing. So monosyllabic, sure and strong, and appropriate for all climates, all locations – the sun outside my window in Illinois was, after all, still shining. Dexterous, multi-talented, still as adjective, adverb, even a verb. The stilled wind. The wind stills. Or, as in stillness, a noun. That blessed after, the cessation of blow and howl.
Or of blow or howl. Or itself – that, too, one of the anthology's chosen words. Its function to link words of near identical meaning or (or!) to balance alternatives on a slender pivot. “To be or not to be.” To snow or not to snow? Or a word, writes Eric Ormsby, but also (and given his name, he should know) the “stuffing” of words. Think about it: without or, orb is nothing “but a sadly disemvowelled b." And ordeal “dwindles sordidly to a deal.” Storm would be reduced to “splinters of toppled consonants.” And what of word itself?
But let’s consider a, the anthology’s first entry. A single letter word, the fifth most commonly used in the English language. The brisk and efficient a that, in advance of its master the noun, arrives early, pulls back the drapes, lights a lamp, and is in fact, writes Joel Brower, meaningless without its master, without a noun like snowstorm or the more particular nor’easter to follow it.Like an auctioneer, a holds up its noun for our consideration, our possible acquisition and use. But a’s hold is tenuous, its attachments always temporary. Its noun -- which often, and sometimes unfortunately, implies many to follow -- will in any future appearance transform a into the.
Yesterday, a snowstorm headed up the coast. Next to come will be the second of the season. And the next the third. And the one after that… well, yes, sobering, that unknown certainty of what, as the season demands, will follow. But not again yesterday’s storm. Not a storm in October. And not, as it turned out, snow in October.