The Silent Crash of Two Clouds

Some thoughts on the recent snow in New York.

By Kate Sibery

Illustration by Iris Pope

Ten days ago they were predicting a lot of snow. “They” being my grandmother’s reference point for all information relating to weather, current events, and anything else you might read about in the newspaper or see on T.V. “They are saying it might get up into the 70s this week.” “They say it’s a good time to start shopping at Fairway.” “They say interest rates are way down.” “They” is her higher power.

Snow seemed the perfect thing to fill the gap between Christmas and New Year’s when it isn’t so clear what any of us are supposed to do. I heard my younger sister saying to my dad, “Do you see how white the sky is?” To her, the blank sky meant that there was snow accumulating in the clouds. Later, I came downstairs and saw her sitting at the dining room table, waiting, as if she could will the white skies to open up and let go of everything they had been holding onto. 

When the snow was just starting to fall my grandma called me from Florida, where she spends the winter, and asked, “How much snow is there now?” before even saying ‘hello.’ That’s typical of her. She probably had the news on all day and wanted to see if “they” were right in their predictions of heavy snowfall. I still have to call and tell her that all that snow never came, that we got four—maybe five—inches. The clouds full of snow swept past our house and dumped it all into the Long Island Sound instead of on our front lawn. 

The snow has now been melting for ten days and the sky is white again, but empty, I think. We never got the 8-10 inches they were predicting. I told my sister that maybe it was because we live by the water, but I don’t really know any of the science behind that. “They” don’t offer much in the way of explanations when their predictions fall short. Something about water temperatures.  

My sister isn’t alone in her obsession with the white sky, which, for both of us, seems like a consolation for the fact of December—a month when the sun sets too early and staying indoors becomes suffocating. On Dec. 14, I looked out to all of the trees in Riverside heavy with snow and wrote this in my journal: 

Maybe I love the snow more than anything else. When I woke up this morning and turned to look out the window all I saw was white. White collecting on the trees and a white sky the way the sky only gets white in winter. Very few things have made me so happy. You would think I grew up in a place where it never snows.

But now the snow we got—less than what we were promised—has mostly melted. 

I’m sure I love the snow for many of the same reasons other people do: the way it blankets trees and roofs and roads indiscriminately, its tendency to appear overnight, and the potential for sledding. But this time, the promise of snow was something else. I keep thinking about a line from Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, about the “silent crash of two clouds.” For Therese, the book’s protagonist, this “crash” embodied the burden of excessive happiness. But for me, this line had less to do with the weight of happiness in excess and more to do with quiet. I read the book in July and remember thinking of the “silent crash of two clouds” as the moment of silence that immediately precedes a summer rainstorm. Now, I realize that the “silent crash of two clouds” is what it sounds like when it’s snowing and the world comes to a point of stillness. This thought might be some indication that I need to get out of the house and stop obsessing over precipitation, or that I will someday end up like my grandmother, calling people up to talk about the weather.