Describing Snow
by Lynn Kane de Marenco
She lives in a tiny, two-room shack on the southern
beach of Carenero Island in Bocas del Toro province. At least she did,
back in the days when Bocas was a sleepy little backwater, and I lived
in a small house built over the sea directly in front of her home.
Little Rosa – not to be confused with Big Rosa, her
mother, who was little more than a child herself – is the twenty-second
offspring of a native man who used to boast that he had 27 children
by five different women. The last two of whom lived next door to each
other just behind me. One or the other of them always seemed to be pregnant,
as if competing for importance in the eyes of the patriarch. Papa spent
a good portion of the little money he earned on a Costa Rican fortune-teller;
his children wore rags. But their lives were not so desperate, as dire
poverty goes. In Bocas dinner can be plucked out of the sea or off of
a breadfruit tree, and good clothes are not such a necessity as the
young ones amuse themselves a la Mark Twain: a large piece of Styrofoam
packing becomes a raft, a neighbor's deck a diving board. That is how
I became acquainted with my little
friend and I throwing it at each other in hard-packed
balls squealing with delight at a snow cone a real one made with
freshly fallen and an Orange Crush catching large fluffy flakes
on my tongue and feeling them melt on a crisp bright winter's day
when the sun makes prisms of the icicles dripping pure water onto
a blanket of blinding white snow angels that my mother showed me
how to make a man of snow with a vegetable face rushing to the fireplace
to peel off gloves and thaw out hands throbbing and tingling
after reminding myself for the dozenth time that I was
"not in Kansas anymore, Dorothy," and that the children's parents would
not be suing me should their little ones break their necks jumping into
the sea from the railing of my deck; I had simply asked Little Rosa
and her playmates to knock at my back door, which connected to the beach,
and ask my permission, rather than simply swimming around and climbing
aboard uninvited. They complied, usually, and thus began the afternoon
parade of children through my home.
Little Rosa was around eight at the time, small for
her age due to her own malnutrition and her mother's, but she seemed
a reasonably bright child, and became fascinated with a stack of magazines
that I kept on a small table that sat along the path from my back door
to the front of my deck. She didn't go to school much, as this would
have interfered with her duties of helping Big Rosa, who at twenty-four
was pregnant with her fourth child. But even though she couldn't read,
Little Rosa eventually grew to spend more time alone poring through
the pictures in my cooking and sports periodicals than she did risking
life and limb bailing off the deck rail with her companions. I answered
innumerable questions: What does that food taste like? Do all the houses
in the United States look like that? Where is that beach? It's prettier
than this
one big storm snowed the front door shut and
the car couldn't get out because there was a mountain of sledding
to be done down the hill toward the pond behind the ski lift that
took us to the kiddy slope trying not to fall down around the barn
my brother writing his name into a snow bank with his
life was very simple then. I had gone to Bocas to open
a little vegetarian restaurant, which I did, and was relieved to close
it five months later, as in those days such an enterprise was unfeasible.
Supplementing my money proved fairly easy, as the islands are a wealth
of raw materials if one is crafts-minded. Mornings were spent paddling
my cayuco to the back side of the island to collect the shell bits that
had been eroded by sand, tide and time into the most fantastic shapes,
rosettes, spirals, to be used for wall hangings, wind chimes, and ornamental
mirrors. Calabasas, cleaned, carved and dried, became lamps. My little
divers brought me bags of tiny, flamingo-pink "fighting conch" shells
for which I paid a dollar, a fortune in their eyes. In the afternoons
I worked on my projects, or swam, waiting for another hallelujah-chorus
sunset. The days melted into each other there. Time seemed suspended,
floated gently like the Caribbean tide.
Some months passed. On a cool, rainy afternoon, when
the tour boats were quiet and my deck was empty and I was carving a
calabasa and Little Rosa was leafing through a fitness magazine, came
the question: What is this man doing? I glanced up at a full-page color
photo of a man slaloming down a mountain. He's skiing, I told her. That's
when you put long, smooth boards on your feet and slide down fast through
the snow.
I don't know that word. What is "snow"?
Setting down my calabasa, I realized that I was dealing
with a child who had never seen snow, had never even heard of it, would
probably never see it, had generations of ancestors who had never experienced
it. Do I pique her interest and imagination about this wonderful substance,
make her long for something she will never know? Do I tell her
about the wonder of flakes the size of quarters
landing on my hair eyelashes mittens that my grandmother helped
me make a big bowl of snow ice cream with condensed milk and frozen
berries or bananas or
do I simply say, It's when rain freezes as it falls
out of the sky because it's cold outside and it lands on the ground
in little pieces of ice instead of water.
Do we have it here in Panama?
No.
Have you ever seen it?
Yes.
And it's cold?
Very. You have to wear a whole lot of clothes when you're
around it.
Then I don't think I'd like it much, she said, and skipped
out of the back door to help Big Rosa, who was bellowing for her from
the beach.
I put away my tools as darkness fell, and I pondered
the richness of my own past. Did I do the right thing, I wondered. Should
I have let her
no, it's better this way.
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