Week 3 – 2021

This is another post from the series “I tried something new this week”. But this week is a bit different, I am not writing about something new that I cooked, or tried, I am writing about something new that I experienced.

Every morning this winter I have been hoping for either blue skies or snow. Granted that snowing doesn’t happen very often in South West London, one can only hope right?

This morning I woke up to the same grey sky that makes every day look the same. The grey is in perfect sync with the monotony of the lockdown and yet it seems like is mocking you every day with it’s passivity. It’s this feeling that you get when you look up, that no sun, moon or stars ever existed. The clouds are not even clouds anymore, they are just a thick blanket that puts the landscape around you in a non flattering light.

I have my morning coffee thinking about ways to make today different and I almost miss the fact that it started snowing. Since I moved to Hampton Wick about 6 years ago it snowed a few times but the snow never managed to set. This time it looks like it’s snowing for real, big snow flakes sticking on cars, trees and covering pretty much everything. I get dressed as quickly as I can and run to Bushy Park. Not many people in the park yet and it’s snowing like it used to snow in Romania in the middle of winters. I grew up with snow about 3 months of the year, I miss it, I dream about it.

I stop in the middle of the park and look up just as I used to do more than 25 years ago. The time just stops. I am a child again. All the stories that I ever read about winter rush through my head. All my winter memories rush through my head. Me sitting by the window, patiently waiting for the first snow of the year to set, hoping that I will get to take the sledge out. The sound of my boots squeezing gently the first snow on my way to school, my mum tying my winter scarf over my mouth on winter mornings so that I am not cold walking to the other side of the village. Everything came rushing in my head. Memories were building on top of each other and forming like snow flakes into snow.

Today I experienced my first snow in Hampton Wick and it was light and it’s probably not going to last until tomorrow. And yet it stormed on me with a force that I haven’t anticipated. I tapped into memories that I didn’t even know that exist. All of a sudden I wasn’t in Bushy Park anymore, I wasn’t taking pictures of the Hampton Court palace gardens covered in snow, I was a child at the edge of a remote village in Transylvania, in the middle of a cold winter.

Sometimes we underestimate how much small things mean to us. How snowflakes can become heavy and meaningful. How memories are triggered by the simplest things around us. We need to create space in our lives, our worry, our everyday routine , for the simple things that bare so much meaning.