On Snow.

It’s snowing in Rochester.

I’m struggling with the cliché idea snowflakes have been endowed with. Surely, I can believe that no two people are alike, the sheer idea that any of our magnanimous atomic structures being aligned in the same manner over the spread of, let’s say, the 20 billion people that have been alive. You and I are surely not the same, though it oft seems we’ve fallen from the same tree of life, just on separate continents to separate mothers.

It seems like snowflakes, though, could very possibly have an identical twin floating somewhere in the atmosphere. In a single storm, perhaps trillions of snowflakes fall. If we take into account the relatively few atoms in each snowflake, it seems nearly impossible that the atmosphere has never (by accident of course, atmospheres have a reputation to protect) created two crystals that are, if not exactly identical, so strikingly similar that it would be hopeless to name them and try to remember which is which should they be scattered among their relatives. I mean, the weather is practically begging for a Mary-Kate and Ashley style switcheroo film. Worse still, would be to name these snowflakes similar sounding names like Ayumi and Tetsumi, should they be Japanese, for example. We can’t assume all snowflakes American, now can we? Some may very well be immigrants from other continents, traveling across vast oceans, morphing into raindrops and waves and perhaps specially bottled water from the French Alps.

I would much prefer to believe that no two snowstorms are alike, since, from where you stand, you can never take in the full expanse of shivering people and scuttling cars. All you can see is what you see... and that is often far different from what you actually see, all snow personification aside.