The greatest things in life are often spontaneous experiences that flutter in front of us before the moment passes like a snowflake melting the moment it collides with the sidewalk.
I saw an igloo in Central Park. It was incredible. Nine feet tall and five feet wide, it glistened amidst the lampposts sprinkled along the enormous oval path encircling the Great Lawn.
Tonight marks hour 33 of the latest New York City snowstorm. The park is gloriously empty. My family is walking home from a cozy Friday night dinner at my parent's home. As the snow fall started in earnest on Thursday morning, I knew that there was a strong chance that Mom and Dad could not come over to my house for dinner because it is too hard to push Dad's wheelchair in the snow. So we packed up the dinner into cooking tins and brought the home cooked feast to them. I felt that stumbling on an igloo on the way home was our reward. My son and I cannot resist gently climbing over the flimsy metal fence to verify what our eyes have discovered from afar.
Once inside the perimeter of the Great Lawn, our boots descend into fourteen-inch powder, leaving crunchy snow prints across the great white expanse. Delirious with anticipation, the banter erupts with each passing step. We want to run but our boots keep sinking deeper and deeper into snowdrifts that up until now have been untouched by human and canine feet. We appreciate the slow approach, savoring the surrealistic moment.
Even a seasoned New Yorker would have to admit that stumbling upon an igloo in the middle of Central Park is a tad unusual. At the same time, as I go through life expecting to encounter wonderful and unexpected adventures, I tend to find them with greater frequency. We loved touching the outside of the igloo and of course going inside.
As we headed home to our dry apartment, we talked about those ice hotels in Sweden and wondered who built the splendid igloo in our back yard. Perhaps it's a marketing pitch for a new kind of ice-cream? Or maybe a frustrated architect wanted to express his or her creativity. Or perhaps a local science team was perfecting its latest geodesic dome for an upcoming Science Fair?
Sunday afternoon, a mere 36 hours later, while walking home from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a I notice that the entire dome has melted into the ground, leaving a two foot circle that resembles the sides of a frozen plastic kiddy pool that someone had abandoned during the summer.
On the other side of town, a sculptor had created an impromptu monument to the Snow. It even had a punny title, "Two Feet of Snow." Get the pun?
The moral of this wintry story? Always grab joy in the moment, before it melts away.
Send me your snow stories and photos and I will share them on the website.
Much love and snowballs,
Lisa