Seeking the promise of re-creation in the snow with a grandchild

By this, she means that when we arrive she’ll be swaddled in a snowsuit and jacket and warm boots and we’ll find her a patch of snow, quick smart, because a winter holiday to her isn’t worthy of the name without snow. It’s been this way for two winters now, and there can be no going back.

She has a toboggan, just like my daughters when they were small, and we will tow her around and find a slope for sliding, her laughter piping in the chill high-country air, just as it did a generation before she was born.

And in the evenings, we will return to the valley, set a fire log leaping in the fireplace and let the quietness of the night settle upon us, just as it did back then.

It is, in short, a rewinding of time. A renewal, if you like.

I was put in mind of the power of grasping the chance to spend time with children when listening to the eulogies this week at the state funeral of the late Simon Crean.

He was known to much of Australia as a trade unionist and a Labor Party politician.

But the important stories told in St Paul’s Cathedral on Thursday were of a man who was forever setting off on adventures with his wife and daughters, trekking through the bush, camping, travelling across Australia and the world in search of new cities and experiences, seeking the magnificence of sunrises and sunsets, and sharing the wonder of it all with those who meant most to him.

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One of Crean’s two daughters spoke of confiding to her father her anxiety when she learned she was pregnant and wasn’t sure how she would handle motherhood. Simon Crean, gently delighted, told her all would be fine – he would take the child walking whenever he was around.

And so he did, and, though he is gone now, he left in his grandson a part of himself to live on.

Perhaps it is in unconscious search of such a legacy that we take to the high country each winter, my grandchild in a fever of expectation in her car seat.

Snow has long exerted a magic spell on our family, though I was heading towards adolescence before I even saw the stuff, briefly, during a holiday with my parents, and I was an adult before I stood on skis, and have never been very stylish at it.

For many years now, however, a group of old friends and I have made a long weekend pilgrimage each winter to a club lodge in the Snowy Mountains, there to carve the slopes during the days and to tell tall tales over dinner and wine, deep into the nights.

It is the essence of the original meaning of the word recreation. We are, to be precise, re-creating ourselves, shedding the detritus of a year observing and reporting upon the often disagreeable and venal affairs of public life.

Why, though, is the snow country so suitable for such rituals, and these days, for exposing a grandchild to the high cold country?

We could, you’d imagine, travel to a warm beach in the north to banish the year’s routine, swimming and telling our tales over seafood and a beer.

Snow, however, has a quality that sets it apart. There is a purity to it when it is fresh, and the silence that settles on the hills after snowfall is unearthly. The high country is quite aloof from the everyday; it is literally above and beyond the concerns that weigh our ordinary lives in the lowlands.

And there is this: every time a cold front brings snowfall, the landscape itself is renewed, a sort of promise that yesterday’s cares are done, and all ahead is untainted.

It is, in short, a place for a child to be struck with awe.

And for a grandparent to take pleasure in the knowledge that though years pass, time rewinds and renewal is never much more than a hand’s length away if you reach out.