What would it be?

Snow. And lots of it. If you live in the Northeast today, you know what I mean: a carpet, a layer, a thick 16-inch sediment. It started coming down during rush hour last evening, and by morning had left the world fully transformed. Trees sparkle; pedestrian boundaries are obscured. The city is largely still.

But not entirely. Smoke rises from our neighbor's chimney; another neighbor valiantly begins to shovel her walk. A municipal truck slowly ambles up our tiny road, spraying salt, and pausing before navigating the turn into the alley.

And, inside our pink home, Cleo is an excited dervish. By 7, we had made biscuits; by 7:30, a loaf of French bread was rising, and she quietly painting, in acrylics. And by 8:30, she had organized a generous play picnic, over which she presided, distributing wooden slices of orange and mock cupcakes to L. and me.

But the highlight came a few moments after that, when, the picnic having run its imaginary course, Cleo made her way over to her toy mount, Wonder Horse, and climbed confidently into the saddle. Next to a window, she could peer out into the crystalline white world as she rocked back and forth. And soon enough, she began to sing, making up words in a lilting two-note melody that seemed both naively simple and deeply profound. In fact, given that I managed to write down a part of her improvised song, I'll step aside, and let Cleo sing:

What would it be
To be out in that snow covered world?
What would it be
To be in that white world?
What would it be
If I were a tree?
Would would it be
If I were in a stocking?
Would would it be
If I was outside in that cold weather?
What would it be
If I was the wind?
If I was building a fire
But the snow covered it?
What would it be
For Wonder Horse to be out in the snow?
What would it be
If I was the sun?

Deeply touched, I listened with an eagerness that was almost raw. But what I liked most, perhaps, was the way in which her imagery toggled back and forth, from the world of the home to the world at large. Clearly, some of the words were simply drawn from objects that she saw. And yet, the whole song seemed, in sum, a sort of mental flirtation: a flitting into the world of white, cold possibility that was offset by, or secured by, a regular cadence of returns to the familiar, or the given. What would it be if her toy stood in the snow? And yet it didn't: the toy stood resolutely next to the radiator. And so the hypothetical timbre of the song seemed, on one level, like a metaphor for imagination itself.

Or perhaps it was merely the literalization of a metaphor. As the sun rose, the salt did its work, and our neighbor shoveled, familiar contours began to re-emerge. What would it be to be out in that world? We found out soon enough: indeed, an hour later, we were outside, getting ready for a half-day at school and the office. 

But even there, we were somehow still transformed - by snow, and by a song.