Summary

Chapter One of “February” is titled “Snow.” Author May begins this chapter with a comment that in many cases, people remember childhoods with more snow than there actually was. She references Bert’s longing to see snow, and her own longing to show it to him, connected to her own memories of snowy winters and her own love for the freedom and change they brings with them. “I am rarely childlike and playful except in snow,” she comments (165), adding that snow reminds her of the power and presence of something outside the personal in the world. She also describes how, in the previous winter, Bert finally got his snow – on a day away from school, when he and the other children in the neighborhood could play in the new snowfall on nearby hills. May describes the day, and the snow, as being “wild...