The First Snowfall Again *

I guess I am keeping my “non-new year resolution.” I have started the translation of A Night at Home and I finished the opening story, “The First Snowfall,” which I’ll summarize for you here. It happened when my family moved from warm Mediterranean Valencia to much colder Madrid. Much to my family’s dismay, my parents were buying a new place in what was considered then the outskirts of the city. Never mind that now is as centric and trendy as the Salamanca district. My mother was consoled leaving her birth place and the house that faced the Botanical Gardens, knowing that we would live right in front the Retiro Park. Since the school year was ready to begin, we would stay for a few months in a boarding house—two bedrooms with kitchen facilities and a shared bathroom with all the other guests—until our new home was ready.

On an early winter morning my mother woke my brother and me up—we slept in a sort of a family room with two daybeds and a round table where we ate our meals and did our homework—with the news that it had snowed and we could stay home from school. She gave us a big breakfast and an egg milkshake as if we were going on an expedition to the North Pole. I guess we had warm clothes because I don’t remember getting cold. My brother and I crossed the Menéndez y Pelayo Boulevard, where the snow had started to melt. The park was closed, but we sneaked in from a side entrance and there everything was snow-covered. The Zoo, which was then in the Retiro Park, was also closed, but we imagined that the benches, covered with snow were bears or tigers. There was no one riding bicycles and no car traffic in the central road. We walked all the way to the big pond, where the rowboats were huddled with piles of snow on their seats as passengers. The trees were shaking like shaggy dogs, dripping snow over the ground.

It must have been my brother who suggested we build a snowman; how he knew how to make it was beyond me. He wasn’t twenty months older than me for nothing. The snowman looked so handsome with his branch arms, his dry leaf mouth and his chestnut eyes that we didn’t want to leave him alone. The idea to take him home was definitely my brother’s. We removed his head and started to roll his body all the way across the eucalyptus grove to the entrance gate. Some dirt was getting stuck to him and he was harder, almost made out of ice, and getting dirty. When we arrived to the boulevard and waited at the cross light, we could tell people were laughing at us. I felt embarrassed, but my brother was smiling proudly.

It wasn’t too difficult to roll the snowball through the entrance steps. Luckily, the doorman wasn’t in his booth when we reached our flat. The cleaning woman opened the door and started screaming and ranting at us. She had just finished cleaning the floors! I think I saw my mother smiling down the hallway. Maybe she liked snow too, even if there wasn’t any in Valencia. We got in trouble because we were frozen and our clothes were dirty. The snowman ended up in the bathtub; he had a long life, so none of the guests could take a bath that evening. As long as he had melted before the cleaning woman came back in the morning, we were safe!

We all know what a snowy winter we’ve had in Philadelphia this year. In fact, it’s snowing as I write this post. From my balcony I can only see as far as MacCall School, the Walt Whitman Bridge and the Stadium have disappeared; it looks like an opera scenery. I go down to Washington Square and take photos; it’s too cold for children to play in the snow today, even the bikes are taking a day off. It’s magical! No wonder I think of my first snowfall in Madrid every time it snows!

* P.S. I realize now that I wrote a post with the same title on January 16th, 2022, before translating this story.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2026 at 4:39 pm by conchaalborg and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.