
The 15th-century French poet Francois Villon never mounted a pair of skis, never grabbed a rope toe, never felt the exhilaration of the swoosh of a downhill schuss. He was, to be sure, for a time in jail, and sometimes he was in exile, and occasionally he actually was at his writing desk. There he sculpted — not merely wrote, but carved a turn in the canon of Western literature — one of the most evocative and best-remembered lines in the Western canon, six words that alone warrant his status as one the greatest of the late-medieval French poets:
Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?
We know that as “But where are the snows of yesteryear?” We also know that that question is the skiers’ Helen, a few words that launch a thousand memories.
And so this is an essay about the snows of yesteryear, and it is prompted by a soft fall of snow that descended on my neighborhood just before the end of the year. Yesteryear, quite literally.