Sliding in snow
Me meeting real voluminous snow for the first time.
Photograph by Kaisa Vänskä, used with permission.

We go for a walk around the neighbourhood, in a perfectly civilised fashion

Two young women who haven’t seen each other for some time, who never have spent all that long together, but whom somehow fit together as if we’ve been friends for years and years. Conversation goes back and forth: life and its tribulations; philosophies and their failings; the weather. Being pen-pals we know about each other’s lives, we understand each other’s stories, and so this conversation is a continuation of an ongoing discussion of life.

And then, as we’re reaching the apartment, I spot a washing line and decide what I want is to nip inside and grab my camera. Bemused, but accepting, my friend grabs her camera too. The washing line is covered in snow, more snow than that sprinkling England had, and I’m thinking suddenly of the Mother. I want to take a picture of this washing line specially for her. I imagine she, and possibly only she, will appreciate it.

And then we’re outside again, and the blue-haired Finnish photographer, who has welcomed me into her home, is laughing at me.

A grin forms over my face when I look at the snow

The air here is fresh, quiet. I was a witness to this landscape on the train from Helsinki. I travelled north. The sun rose and the snow deepened. I saw the white roads, the banks of snow, the tall trees and frozen lakes. My friend met me at the train station and we took a road trip with sandwiches and a flask of tea. I marvelled at how she drove on ice, how the tyres just worked. How everything was white, and yet, at the same time, in the ever changing sunlight, nothing was. My delight continues. I cannot quite believe my eyes. There is so much snow – less she says than years past – more than I could imagine.

She’s a wonderful photographer

Her pictures capture the quiet silence of this place. The shadows and light of the low sun. The sparkles in the crystals of frozen condensation. The small glimpses of life through the flutter of a bird’s wings. Nature’s sculptures – buried trees – worthy of a permanent position in a sculpture park.  And, between laughing at me and my disbelief, she’s teaching me. Showing me that to make the snow appear white I need to have the histogram for my photo closer to over-exposed than underexposed. Warning me that when I take my camera inside I must keep it zipped tight in its bag, so that it warms slowly, for preferably at least an hour, and doesn’t get damaged by the moisture.

And I snap away. My photos under-exposed, then over-exposed as I switch from taking pictures in the shade of the building to pictures dominated by the sunlight bouncing off the bright, sparkling snow. But in time I find balance. The controlled, yet imp-like smile of my friend gives me permission to take my time. There’s no rush here. She laughs at my delight as I squeal about the snow being like glitter, or because at last I have managed to take a picture of her that’s not a silhouette. I sound like a child, amazed and free.

Then she points to a mound of snow, which some local children have made into a slide

She suggests that I try sliding down, although she doesn’t try herself. She plonks herself and her camera down in the snow, as if the snow were a sofa that one could sink into with ease. Cautiously I climb up, taking care of my footing, I sit slowly, and then, gently I slide down.

And then I run up, my boots springing off the ice. And slide down.

It’s somewhere between minus seven and minus twenty but I have forgotten about the cold. I run up and slide down.

My dear friend gets me a plastic bag. And I run up, lay the bag down on the ice slide, sit upon it and go. Again and again and again. Until my clothes are sticky with sweat and my breath catches in my chest. And I’m laughing. Frost forms on my scarf. I’m talking in quick spurts, occasionally checking that still buried in the cold snow my friend is happy for my to be so indulgent. But she grins as she snaps more and more pictures and tells me I can go again, if I want. Like a grandmother who has seen it many times before and yet is still moved by the childish delight.

I decide I love snow.