Snow makes me angry

Also, how to smell like a Berlin nightclub and the laundry aisle at Walmart

I’ve always been a little angry at snow because I don’t know what sound it makes.

When the snow is actually falling I’m in love with it. I’m from Louisiana and it still feels like confetti from heaven to me. I’m like your favorite TikTok dog, I can’t wait to get out there and run in circles and be the first to make footprints and just roll in the stuff.

Big dog in the courtyard of my apartment complex.

But once I’ve gotten over the first rush and I’m walking in it, I can feel myself growing more and more frustrated with it. Maybe if you grew up with snow you know what it sounds like but I don’t. It’s an indescribable sound and every time another writer nails it, comes up with a description so honest and true that you as the reader think, “yes, I can feel the snow under my feet at this exact moment,” that’s when I feel the bile rising in my throat because I have never had any idea, really, what snow sounds like.

Sara Teasdale has a lovely opening to her poem, “A Winter Bluejay,” that I think does a good job of describing the sound.

A Winter Bluejay

Crisply the bright snow whispered,
Crunching beneath our feet;
Behind us as we walked along the parkway,
Our shadows danced,
Fantastic shapes in vivid blue.
Across the lake the skaters
Flew to and fro,
With sharp turns weaving
A frail invisible net.
In ecstasy the earth
Drank the silver sunlight;
In ecstasy the skaters
Drank the wine of speed;
In ecstasy we laughed
Drinking the wine of love.
Had not the music of our joy
Sounded its highest note?
But no,
For suddenly, with lifted eyes you said,
“Oh look!”
There, on the black bough of a snow flecked maple,
Fearless and gay as our love,
A bluejay cocked his crest!
Oh who can tell the range of joy
Or set the bounds of beauty?

Appears in A Poem for Every Winter Day, edited by Allie Esiri. 

And I think Philip Gross’ wave imagery, for me anyway, also creates some good snow sound effects.

But when I try to do it I get a little stuck, a little dismissive of my own voice. Crunchy? Sure. We all get crunchy.

But what are those other elements, the other noises mixed in there? There’s a squeak, right? There’s that rubbery noise like your tupperware when you get it really clean.

Also, I swear there’s sometimes a burp, almost a belch, all the ice crystals collapsing at different rates and to different degrees under your weight. Where once there was light and fluffy, now there is flat and compressed.

Ice scratches. You get some ice on the bottom of your shoe and you’re going to start scratching, every footprint you make will scratch out the edges like its moving through eons of limestone deposits and you’re the next ice age, come to etch new, unpredictable carvings on the walls of footprint canyons.

One thing that’s helping is that I’ve gotten into perfumes lately. I’ve been reading about them online and then ordering, mostly, samples because samples are what I can afford. At one well-known perfume website, the samples are $4/pop and they’ll send you free samples with your samples order, which is how I’ve ended up with about a zillion and one samples.

Just some of my many samples. Also one of them is named “Mistpouffer” which … how can you not?

I like reading the perfume reviews, which are similar to reading wine reviews except, with wine, people often taste in order to find out the one “right” answer to how the wine tastes, as if this world were some long pop quiz. 

“I taste cantelope,” says one character, tasting Riesling, in some movie or book I once saw — I think a movie, maybe Sideways, I can’t remember.

“Only a very sophisticated taster would taste the cantelope,” complimented the sophisticated sommelier (I think?) in this movie that I’ve almost forgotten except for this one scene that really bothered me.

By contrast, nobody seems to know how a perfume smells, and reassuringly, everyone seems to know that.

“You have to smell it on your own body chemistry,” much of the advice to people new to fragrances reads. “Keep a journal of perfumes and try not to look at the perfume’s smelling notes. Try to smell for yourself.”

Part of the problem is that we’re very bad at translating smells to language, so we need a lot of practice. For most of us, sight is our primary sense, with taste and sound as close seconds. We’re very used to describing how someone looked, how bread tasted, how the music sounded.

Even touch is easier than smell. 

Think of a fingernail biting into the flesh of an orange. Think maybe of a rose, or clean linen, or the sea. These are some of the few, almost universally recognized scents.

Outside of these, and once they become muddled, we become lost. I can almost feel a smell entering my nose and getting lost on the way to my brain. By the time it reaches my language center, it’s a scramble.

One fragrance I love is described variously on a perfume review site as “a whore’s bath,” “musty/sweaty armpits and gay sex. So yeah, any berlin club darkroom,” and “the laundry aisle at Walmart.” I swear it smells fantastic on me, but maybe I like curry, sweat, gay sex, Berlin night clubs, and also doing laundry?

To start smelling, it helps to be as gentle with yourself as possible, or that’s what I’ve found.

I am not able, yet, to parse out complicated scents — to say that this scent is lily and that scent is edelweiss. I have to start out with the broadest possible strokes. It’s floral, I might be able to say. 

Or sometimes, this scent reminds me of a sunny day, or this one feels a little wooded to me.

And then I sit there a while. Wooded and … maybe piney?

There is no one to judge me. No one to say I’m wrong. It might be a whore’s bath. It might be a circus peanut. What does this scent smell like?

Maybe pine woods and also a little bit of mist somehow? Maybe mossiness, like some moisture in there?

To smell, you cannot edit yourself. I am terrified of not editing myself.

I think that’s why I never knew what snow sounded like. I wanted to know, but I edited myself from hearing, really listening to the snow.

Everything that wasn’t crunchy or maybe squeaky sounded silly to me. Burpy? Who ever heard of snow burping? That wasn’t what sophisticated people hear when they listen to snow. Sophisticated people know that Riesling tastes like cantaloupe and snow doesn’t burp.

But it’s what I hear. I hear something a little squeaky and scratchy and burpy. I hear something not very sophisticated. 

What do you hear, when you go walking in the snow, or maybe on the sand or on gravel? Have you ever been frustrated at your inability to describe a particular sound or smell or other sense? How did you manage that? I’d love to hear in the comments.