[Anand Pandian]

The workshop with Jason Davis this afternoon was amazing. The prompts brought a story to mind.

My name is Anand and I’m from Baltimore. I haven’t always been from Baltimore; my family is from south India and I grew up in California. My wife and I moved here for work about fifteen years ago now, but our kids were born here, we’ve lived in the same house and walked the same sidewalks and trails through the woods for many years now, and over these years in our adopted home, no longer quite as newcomers, we’ve also come to see what change feels like on the ground and in the air.

I remember so vividly what happened one winter at Lake Roland, a few miles north of where we live in the city. I’d gone out there one afternoon with my son and daughter to walk one of trails around the reservoir, built more than a century ago. It was a really cold winter, or at least an intense cold snap in the midst of that winter, and the lake had frozen over, had mostly become a flat sheet of ice. This may have happened a lot in the past, I don’t know. But it was a big deal that year, people were talking about it, and we went to take a look.

We spent a lot of time that afternoon just throwing things across the water: small branches, rocks, and whatever else seemed to have enough mass to launch well across the ice. The ice was thicker in some places, thinner than others, and the way that the sound changed while these things sped across the ice, the shifting tone of that resonance and reverberation through the air across and the ice and water below, it was amazing to take it, it felt musical, that vibration, in itself.

But all of this is just a prelude to what I wanted to share, a moment that I hope never to forget. As we rounded a bend around that small lake, picking our way carefully through the frozen earth hidden under the crisp fallen leaves, we were startled by the sight of a movement across the ice that had nothing to do with our antics. Two foxes had appeared all at once on the ice, one chasing the other across the wide span of the lake, racing across that white expanse then disappearing into the brown trees beyond.

The sight of them was a marvel. The fact that they too could move so easily across the ice was riveting to us. The freedom in that movement, the effortlessness of their passage across the ice, that too was gripping somehow, so unlike our tedious tromping down that frozen trail.

This is a story about ice and cold, not about fire and heat. But I think that my recollection of that moment is tinged deeply with a sense of how precarious the simple fact of winter has become, the very idea of that season. Because so much of our time together in the winter, my children and I, has been about the unusual wonders of those months: sledding down the small hill down the road from our house, throwing balls of snow at each other in cackling fits of running and stumbling through the those winter heaps, even the work of having to scrape and shovel the sidewalks together. Nothing to take for granted here, anymore.

The uncertainty that begins to set in every year, this time of year: What will it be like? Will we have a real winter? Will we have snow? Those foxes on the ice spoke to the hope in all those questions, somehow.