When I think of an Eskimo, I see an image that was popular at one time - a calm pale brown face framed by the fur-lined hood of their traditional garb. We were told in school that the Eskimo people who lived way up north near the Arctic circle built their houses using blocks of ice. These houses, small domes with a tunnel-shaped entry, were known as igloos. The Eskimo had fifty words for snow - or maybe it was a hundred - for different varieties of the frozen precipitation - slush, tiny crystals, pebbles, big fat soft flakes. Maybe there were poetic words too, and words for the time of year, and how the snow fell - stormy wind or no wind. They had no word for green, I heard. In their language, greens were labeled as shades of blue. Perhaps in their northern homes, green wasn't seen very much, and wasn't very vivid. Did they every day of the year come out of their igloos to a world of blue sky and shades of white ice?

Living in south Louisiana where snow made only one or two timid appearances in a winter, if at all, it was fascinating to wonder about a culture that had so many words for snow, and homes of ice that did not melt.