Snow sometimes works against me, and sometimes with me. I was walking along the north side of Elizabeth Street, and just east of Leslie I saw the snow highlighting some of the letters in a worn, old Department of Public Works stamp. I took some snow with my mitten and rubbed it into the rest of the stamp (feeling awkward as I realized a dog walker had seen me do this) and this is what it looked like. I wonder what the next people to walk this way thought of the white highlighting that I had left behind.

This is the same principle behind rubbing chalk or flour into gravestone inscriptions, except unlike those practices (which are very much frowned upon) this won’t cause any harm. A little while later on my walk, on Allen Street, the snow was my friend again. It caused the start of an old-looking stamp that I’ve never seen before to jump out at me. I’ve walked that block many times without noticing it. I got down on the ground and sprinkled some extra snow, rubbing it in to try to make the stamp legible. I couldn’t quite do it. Besides, where the date would have (or should have) been there was a patch of obscuring ice. I added it to my list of places to check again later.

I have thought about trying to do rubbings of the sidewalk as people do with gravestones. Even that practice, though not nearly as harmful as rubbing material into the inscription directly, is controversial. It is said to risk damaging an already old inscription, or at least contribute to wearing it down. It sounds absurd, I suppose, to worry about causing wear to something designed to be walked on for a hundred years. But I treasure these fading markings and don’t want to hasten their illegibility. I have picked up a habit of avoiding walking on them. Maybe I’ll try this method of using aluminum foil, which is supposed to be the most harmless way to read gravestones. If, that is, I can get past how self conscious kneeling in front of someone’s house with a sponge and a roll of Reynolds Wrap is going to make me.