About Grace by Anthony Doerr

room, nosing through the pantry.
    His mother loved the building: its drafts and big-paned windows; the way the floors, no matter how much you scrubbed, smelted permanently of tannins. She walked barefoot over the cold boards, and dragged open the curtains, and showed David how if they scratched their names into the panes with a pin, winter frost would freeze around the letters. On the roof she’d gather palmfuls of snow and press them into her mouth and make pronouncements on their quality: sweet or pure, grainy or velvety. “Back home,” she’d say, “there is a snow my grandfather called santa lunta. It came one night a year, always around Christmas. He’d pack it into little tin funnels and pour fruit juice on it and we’d eat it for dessert. Like ice cream. Only better.”
    His mother the Ice Queen. The only thing he still had of hers was a book: Snow Crystals , by W. A. Bentley. Inside were thousands of carefully prepared micrographs of snowflakes, each image reproduced in a two-inch square, the crystals white against a field of black, arrayed in a grid, four-by-three, twelve per page. Bound in cloth, it was a 1931 first edition her grandfather had bought at a rummage sale. She would page through it carefully, almost devotedly, occasionally calling David over to ask him his favorites. She’d hold his finger and trace the outlines of whatever shapes lay hidden within: six hippos’ heads, six dragons’ eyes, six tiny sea horses in profile.
    Eight-year-old Winkler would wrap a board in black felt and climb to the roof to catch snowflakes as they floated down. He studied them with a Cracker Jack plastic hand-magnifier. Only rarely was he able to capture an individual crystal, undamaged in its journey from the clouds, and he’d sit with a pencil and a damp notebook, trying to sketch it before it melted: the corollas, the interstices, the kaleidoscopic blades. When he’d accumulated twenty or so drawings, he’d take the damp pages downstairs, staple them together, and present the book to his mother with grave ceremony.
    â€œIt’s beautiful, David,” she’d say. “I will treasure it.” She’d set the little booklet on top of Bentley’s Snow Crystals , on the shelf beneath the coffee table.
    In grade school he read about irrigation, ice fields, clouds. He could still remember a poster on the wall of his fourth-grade classroom: THE WATER CYCLE —oceanic clouds creeping over a town, dropping rain on steeples and rooftops, rainwater pooling in a river, the river charging through a dam’s spillway, easing back into the ocean, a smiling sun evaporating seawater into tufts of cartoon vapor, the vapor condensing into clouds.
    By high school he was beginning to understand that the study of water and its distribution phenomena yielded again and again to sets of reassuring patterns—Hadley cells, cycling air in the troposphere, dark bands of nimbostratus. To consider water on any scale was to confront a boundless repetition of small events. There were the tiny wonders: raindrops, snow crystals, grains of frost aligned on a blade of grass; and there were the wonders so immense it seemed impossible to get his mind around them: global wind, oceanic currents, storms that broke like waves over whole mountain ranges. Rapt, seventeen years old, he mail-ordered posters of seas, lakes, calving glaciers. He caught raindrops in pans of flour to study their shape; he charted the sizes of captured snow crystals on a handmade grid.
    His first week in college he met with a counselor and made earth sciences his major. A chemistry unit on the hydrologic cycle that had other students yawning seemed to him a miracle of simplicity: condensation, precipitation, infiltration, runoff, evapotranspiration—water moved around and through us at every moment; it leached from our cells; it hung invisibly in front of our eyes. Theoretically, water was inexhaustible,