Every artist has their medium. Snow is not my daughter’s. My theory (based on the current state of her basement art studio), is that snow is too monochrome (#FFFFFF is sooo pedestrian).
Yet this irritates me, probably due to my own childhood memories. Texas didn’t offer much in the way of snow, and as our culture as a whole is heavily influenced by the Midwest and New England and their associated images of holiday blizzards, Christmas time always carried with it a bit of melancholy as I peered out the window across a wind-swept and barren Dust Bowl landscape. I never once rode a sled in my childhood, and on only one notable occasion do I remember building a snowman (to which my dad added breasts, followed by mom administering a mastectomy via garden trowel).
But the joke’s on this youngest generation. Climate change will either warm the region beyond the point of regular snow, or cool it to the point that it destroys us. Either way, those quaint Rockwellian scenes will vanish alongside the planet’s biodiversity. And I, Dad, will mock my child for her youthful indifference.
–Simon