Spring and snow. They should not come in the same week, but too often even here at ibiblio world headquarters, they do.
He suddenly wakes up and finds that he is impervious to the snow. Not only that, but it is speaking to him. He decides that he will write down the words of the snow, and, as he studies them, they gradually begin to melt, giving way to spring. After he has written down all that there is to know about the crystals they vanish completely, and people begin to awaken from their frozen slumber.
From a synopsis of Abe Kôbô’s 1951 short story, “Shijin no shôgai ” appearing as “The Life of a Poet” in English from the ibiblio Abe Kôbô site.
As you might expect, Project Gutenberg has a large collection of various writings on the snows of springs past. But you may not realize that Spring Snow is also the subject of a contradance, a type of sturdy crab apple, a “New Light of Myanmar” article on ocean plant blooms,
In Hyperwar‘s scan of the 1944 FM 70-10 War Department Field Manual for Mountain Operations, we learn:
New firn snow is compact, granular snow that is composed of closely associated grains instead of individual flakes. Heat-softened new firn snow is refered to as Spring Snow by skiers.