I felt, so when I wrote Snow Music, that book started I took our dog for a walk on a snowy morning and he had, he was a very energetic dog and for every two steps I took down the road he was back and forth a bunch of times. So he had you know all these foot, oh and there were tire tracks that had gone down the road, two sets of tire tracks, so it wasn’t quite like a music staff because there were only four lines but still his little dog footprints going back and forth I thought oh wow, that looks like a music staff.
I started thinking how it would be fun to make a little movie with different animals moving through the snow and having music that would match, kind of like Peter and the Wolf but without that story you know, have music match their kind of movement. So I had that thought and then I let it sit for a long time.
And then I came back to it later and I just started drawing. I started drawing, I think the first thing I drew was the squirrel and I, you know I was kind of in between things, I didn’t know what I was going to do next and I actually just found it really fun to draw every hair on the squirrel, it was kind of calming to do this really detailed little squirrel drawing.
And I was at the time looking at a squirrel outside our window and I don’t know where it came from but the words oh I know, part of it was that they had, I had heard something on the radio about how squirrels don’t really remember where they left their nuts, they just you know, keep looking and I think there are different theories about that. But I was watching this squirrel jumping around and the words I think, I think I left it, I think I left it here somewhere just kind of popped into my head.
That started, that was I think a pivotal moment in that book of what the book was going to be about and I remember watching snow fall and wondering how you would describe that sound that’s almost not even a sound and I thought of, it would be a whispered sound with no, it was like peth, peth, peth was the word I came up with and I just filled a whole page with peth, peth, peth and then at the end of the book when I decided that in evening when the snow falls it would be sort of backwards but not quite.
Instead of peth, peth, peth, it would be fep, fep, fep. It would be a slightly different sound and you can tell that I live in a really small world because to me this just seemed like it’s brilliant. I felt really smart when I thought of making it be thep, thep, thep at the end of the day. But you know once you start thinking that way, things start, you start seeing things that way.
Like when the snow plow comes down the road you know you can think of the different sounds that it’s making and when you’re sitting in the car with your kids and they’re putting their finger on the window and it’s [noise], you know that’s part of the sound of that kind of day too, so.
