City Desk: Snow Day.(Brief Article)

The first sign of snow in the city can be unusual sounds at night. On early winter mornings, when the sleep cycle has brought me almost to awareness, I become aware of a hush, like sonic velvet. On it, like jewels in a case at Bergdorf's, are displayed a few discrete noises: the muffled spin of tires; the joyous hooting of a passerby (a child's squeal, coming out of an adult voicebox: We age, but our reaction to new snow doesn't). If I hear the hollow scrape of a plow blade, then I know it is snowing in earnest, and that when I get up the world will be transformed.

Snow is tireless and ubiquitous. Six inches of it, newly fallen, seems less like a substance than an emotion: irony or love, which alters everything. Sharp things are smoothed, inconspicuous things are outlined, big things are hidden. The tips of 19th-century iron fence posts support billowing white sails. Park benches wear imposing, pre-emptive cushions: THIS SEAT IS TAKEN. Piled-up trash bags become round female forms: siesta in a harem. Cars parked on the sidestreets look like muffins just arrived at the coffee shop from the bakery for the morning rush. The statues of long-dead public men put on new couture. Around the corner from my apartment there is a bust of Washington Irving, kind, wise, and anxious; after a snowfall he wears a hat like a pope of the Coptic church. Peter Stuyvesant, around the corner in the other direction, has thrown a cowl over his wiry bantam's shoulders, while his eye sockets, unwelcoming in the best of circumstances, have become cadaverous and demonic.

As soon as the new world of snow is in place, the process of destroying it begins. The first destroyer is you, going out to experience it. Your footprints leave proofreader's marks in the white margins of perfection. You can avoid looking at your handiwork only if, like Ulysses Grant, you never retrace your steps. The wind, second-guesser, rearranges the snow as tirelessly as the storm that put it in place. Clouds of powder tumble from branches as if from flour sifters; inch by inch, white yields to the brown and black of bark, smoothness to wrinkles. The first deliberate human tampering, besides walking and shoveling, is usually whimsical. Hand-sized scoops are taken from car roofs and hoods, either to be stuffed down the shirts of shrieking girls, or simply for the sake of leaving a mark. A venturesome rear end, heedless of cold, leaves its print on a step or a bench: This is my seat, I have a ticket. Dogs used to deposit artwork in the snow, but sculpture has been forbidden them. Even as Mayor Giuliani hammered the Brooklyn Museum of Art for showing Chris Ofili's Dung Madonna, the dog-owners of Manhattan have been persuaded, by 20-some years of fines, to clean up after their best friends.

Shopkeepers and building owners ...