Most Sunday afternoons, I begin kicking around in my mind some ideas for my next newspaper column. I normally don’t start the serious thinking or writing until Monday morning, which gives me plenty of time to meet my Wednesday deadline.
But this Sunday afternoon is different. Though most Putnam Countians, including me, dodged the ice storm that crippled many of our neighbors, the rain that has been falling most of today is changing over to snow. Snow that might amount to nothing or might amount to something. If the precip turns icy and knocks out electricity and makes the roads impassable, it will be hard for me to write this column and hard to get it to my editors. Sure, I can compose it with pen on paper, with scratch-outs and insertions and back-and-forth arrows and other old-timey ways to edit. Then I can take a picture of all that mess with my cell phone and text it in, but that’s far from ideal.
Better to write the column now, while my lights are on and my heat pump is warming the house and my computer is running on electricity and not battery.
What I will write is that no matter how challenging this current winter storm turns out to be, it will be nothing to compared to Alaska in 1920. That place and time are fresh in my mind because I recently read Eowyn Ivey’s (no kin to yours truly) debut novel “The Snow Child,” which was a fiction finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. It didn’t win, though I can’t imagine why.
Ivey grew up in the little bitty town of Palmer, Alaska and still follows what she describes as a “rural, subsistence lifestyle” there with her husband and two daughters.
“The Snow Child” tells the story of a middle-aged couple who move from Pennsylvania to the wilds of Alaska trying to escape the grief of childlessness. In a small cabin near the fictional Wolverine River, Mabel and Jack heat and cook with wood, use an outhouse, haul water from the river and rely on light from an oil lamp during winter days when “the sun would rise just before noon and skirt the mountaintops for a few hours of twilight before sinking again.”
Because this column is not intended to be a comprehensive book review, I’ll say little more except that—on a rare day when playfulness briefly returns to their lives–Mabel and Jack build a snow child, complete with red mittens and a scarf, in their front yard. Inexplicabley, it comes to life as the daughter they never had, a little girl whom they name Faina. So, yeah, there’s a strong element of magical realism to the story.
I’ll also say that “The Snow Child” is one of the best books I’ve ever read.
As I sit at my desk on this late January afternoon, sipping coffee I brewed in a plug-in coffee maker with water I drew from the tap and pondering which of the many possibilities in my refrigerator and pantry I’ll fix for supper, I can’t help but think about that fictional couple struggling to stay alive in Alaska. Every day, they hoped and prayed Jack would shoot a rabbit or a weasel or a ptarmigan. They rejoiced when he happened upon a moose, which he killed and dragged home and cut to pieces and which fed them throughout the winter.
Here in Tennessee, more than a century after fictional Jack shot that fictional moose, TV meteorologists warn that we’re facing single-digit low temperatures all week. They talk about wind chill and black ice and frozen pipes and a whole lot of other scary stuff. They warn viewers not to attempt driving on our treacherous roads unless it’s absolutely necessary.
I have no need for such advice. Until this mess finally melts, I’ll be curled up in my reading chair, happily enjoying “The Snow Child” all over again.
(January 31, 2026)