Walking in Snow

The weather's been a little harsh here, so I've barely gone out, but yesterday, getting that old cabin fever feeling again, I bundled up and ventured into the blizzard. There are so few hours of daylight here; you have to steal what chances you have.
I walked through my neighborhood, crossed the main road. The snow was falling hard and the drifts made walls along the sidewalks – but at Oktoberskaya, people had tramped out a footpath leading downhill, away from the street towards the park and the forest. So I followed this path. I wasn't alone of course. Ahead of me an elderly man was walking with his wife, one in a big hat, the other in a long fur coat. Tromping along hand-in-hand in a blizzard on a Friday afternoon in January.
Love is funny and beautiful sometimes.
And other people – men mostly, but a few women – alone, pacing very slowly with their heads bowed and their hands behind their backs. They didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. Just walking. I guess I too am one of the just-walkers…
So we went on this way, over a bridge and a frozen spillway to the shores of a broad basin all filled up with snow – Skolnoye Ozero, School Lake. There was a boathouse at the near end. I could just see the top of a beached pontoon boat sticking out of the drifts, and close by the lifeguard towers and changing huts of a swimming beach. There's something lovely and surreal about a beach in the snow, I don't know why.
Out on the ice a man had a little fire going in a can; he was crouched over a hole, ice-fishing, and nearby another group was doing the same. Where they had cleaned their fish there were bloodstains in the snow.
Then I had to step off the path to let a cross-country skier go by, but five minutes later I was ahead of him again – he wasn't a very good skier, and he'd tripped out of his skis.
Further down the lake there were other skiers, and some children tobogganing down the bank onto the ice. I passed a group having a picnic on a park bench. The two men were standing. The girl was on the bench, but crouched on the balls of her feet, not actually sitting, because of the Russian dread of cold surfaces…They had laid out a whole spread on the bench: sausages, vodka, a jar of pickles, and they didn't look up as I passed.
When I got to the very end of the lake, I stopped and looked back. Everything was hazy and monochrome in the falling snow – the low sky, the forest, the beach – and the small dark figures moving through the landscape made it seem like a Brueghel painting. Someone somewhere let off a firecracker. A flock of gray crows lifted from a pine, and a woman who had been pacing on her way paused, just for a minute, and looked around.
When it was silent again I realized I could hear the snow falling on my hat and shoulders.