Salt and Snow of the Brain

Help. I have salt and snow of the brain. You understand what I mean, right?

Remember the school exercise where you have to describe what salt tastes like? I remember using words like: sour, not sweet, tangy, like tears, etc. It’s hard.

We have a good friend who lives in Brazil. It stays hot all year round. He wants to know what snow is like. He knows what ice is, and that is his only comparison.

So here’s my first bumbling effort:

Snow isn’t hard like ice, it’s soft and fuzzy and freezing. It falls just like rain, but since it’s soft and fuzzy, it floats around a bit before landing. It doesn’t come straight down all the time. When the wind blows, all the snowflakes look like a lacy curtain. And when it hits your skin, it’s like soft cold spots hitting all over.

It piles up and you can run through it, kicking it up like leaves. After a freezing night, it gets hard and crunchy. It’s hard to walk through then. Your foot sinks down in with a crunching sound. The snow can get very deep, past your knee and it wears you out to walk very far. But you can wear snowshoes which are these big flat things that you strap on your feet. They keep you up on top of the snow.


People only wear them for fun, though. We use shovels whenever it snows to scoop paths to walk on. We even have machines called snow-blowers that suck the snow up and shoot them into a pile on the side.

Okay, it’s your turn. How would you describe snow to someone who’s never experienced it?