Meditations on Snow

I went out and took some more pictures of the snowy landscape. It's not often we get this much snow anymore. We had several inches on Saturday, and now we're getting a lot more. It's also drifted a bit, so even with nearly knee-high boots on I couldn't go far out into the backyard without risking getting snowy wet pants. So I wandered around the front of the house and took photos of the front yard.

Snow is so beautiful when you're watching it fall, seeing it collect on the branches of trees and plants. It collects, like water does, but in such a different and elegant way. Powdery snow sits in clumps on the dead flowers of my butterfly bush, bowing the branches, forming little rounded pyramids of snow. It lays along the limbs of the trees, painting their dark bark with a bright highlight. It gathers along fences, piles up on the posts. It perches along the lines of my washline, occupying those spaces where the spiders set up shop in the warmer months. It balances precariously on the smallest surface, clinging until it's knocked down or swept aside by a passing creature or the action of the wind. The snow wraps the world in a thick, cold blanket of white which seems so very comforting to me as I sit here in my warm room with my morning cup of tea, watching it tumble to earth in little fluffy blobs.

The wind is picking up a bit, so now the snow is not so much drifting to the ground as swirling that way, pushed around and down, forced to fly in harsh diagonals instead of floating lazily along. It's my favourite kind of snow to watch: the big flakes that I can watch individually, following one after another with my eyes as they describe a path from the top of my window down to where the snowy ground makes them vanish from my view. It's less enjoyable when the wind is authoritatively shoving the poor fluffy flakes this way and that instead of letting them find their own way.

Later on I'll be out shoveling it off my driveway, so I'll likely have an entirely different set of observations about the snow from that perspective. But for now, I'm inside, warm, with tea, listening to classical music on Beethoven Radio and enjoying the show Nature is putting on today. I give it two thumbs up.