I'm Shira Erlichman and this is The Slowdown.

My family immigrated to the U.S. from Israel in January of 1991.

So the first time I saw snow, I was six years old.

We lived in a basement apartment with hardly any light and iron bars on the windows.

Our front steps were a steep 90-degree incline to our front door.

When that first snowfall came, it piled on top of that incline, blocking the entire door.

From inside the living room, my Abba grabbed a shovel.

I watched him fling open the door to a crisp white wall.

And he cracked it with the lip of the shovel and began digging a tunnel out.

In that instance, snow was so much more than a thing that fell.

It was a compounding, a blockade, a dense, glittering being.

My sixth year on Earth, I was delighted that it snowed a lot in Massachusetts.

I remember sitting at one of those barbed windows with a fresh journal in my lap.

It had a flowered cloth cover and felt undeniably special.

Watching the glittering being maneuver through my new quiet street,

I wrote down the beginnings of a poem.

The snow is a man taking off his clothes in the street.

It fascinated me.

This being was so mercurial, dense enough to fight a shovel's kiss,

wild and soft enough to undress in the street.

And as my brother and I leapt over slushy puddles after school in the park,

it was also capable of transforming into piles of slop, not disappeared, not concrete,

...