Threat Level White

Snow Can Be Pretty. And Too Much Snow Can Be Pretty Creepy.

Like a cloak of insanity, the snow dropped.

Falling like one of those quiet obsessions you read about in short stories, setting the scene for heightened senses, muffling normal sounds. Falling like snow on a black-and-white TV. Like madness. Like when one of those Edgar Allan Poe characters falls into a spell so deep he can focus on only one thing, see only one thing, hear only one thing.

The snow seemed to do the same to this city, spreading inexplicable sounds and images, coating it in a spooking kind of silence, except for that clap of thunder sometime right before midnight Saturday. Did you hear that? And in the morning you swear you hear a child laughing somewhere, somewhere outside. But it is 5 a.m. Zip, the blinds tear from the window. You hear the laughter still, a creepy kind of child's laughter like in "The Bad Seed," but you cannot find the child.

Then you notice the blazing whiteness, a fluorescent kind of white that pierces each room, with the kind of brightness that you would expect on a summer day, except there is no summer. The kind of blazing light like when the old movie is over and all that is left on the screen is the white projector light, but your eyes have adjusted to darkness and are not ready for the light.

Then the electricity goes out. A beep downstairs. The shrill ring of a phone and some robotic voice telling you the caller is unidentified . You must get out of the house. But first you must find the snow boots you put away when it was so mild in January that people were wearing shorts. Who would expect another crazy snowfall when crocuses had already started blooming and a redbird was spotted in the back yard?

You descend into the now-dark, now-scary basement looking for the boots. The iridescent light from the snow cannot reach down here. You fly back up the stairs. Try to act like an adult. Think. Find the camping light, then descend into the darkness again. You find the boots, but where is the snow shovel? Probably in the garage where raccoons are known to lurk. You forgo the shovel.

In the thesaurus, snow is listed on the page with the heading "Sniper-Soar." Under Snow, some of the words listed are refrigerator, drug, poison, words that some people mean when they say snow. Under snowflake is written: softness, powder, white thing. You stop at white thing. It sounds creepy.

Outside, the snow has covered up everything that was ugly. Like a white blanket on falsehoods, negation, duplicity, impostors and meekness.

It is not yet afternoon, and Surabhi Dabir is "grumpy" because she could not find her boots. There she stands in her husband's black boots, dragging the kids to a snow hill. "I would like it more if I were color-coordinated in pink," she says.

Just then her son Anand, 4, screams one of those inexplicable screams that 4-year-old children tend to scream. The same kind of scream the inner child would like to let go when things are not perfect. His brother, Arjun, 7, has just kicked snow into his sled. His father, Jeremy Blum, a research scientist, is trying to explain that snow is meant to go inside sleds. But Anand doesn't buy the premise, and wipes the snow out.

In the same parking lot, there is Randy Cohen, 43, of Takoma Park, who says last night he noticed the full moon. Just then his wife, Ginny Cohen, begins reciting poetry: "The moon over the breast of the new fallen snow gave the luster of midday to objects below." She adds: "Even though there was no moon last night."

"There was a moon," counters Randy. "It lit up the clouds and the clouds lit up the snow and it was lovely last night."