Snowy Observations and Wishing for Spring

Last Friday I had a doctor's appointment to check in over lab results. While I waited in the exam room for the doctor to see me, I looked out the back window. The snow that had just fallen two days earlier was bright and largely unbroken - beautiful. I wrote this in my handy-dandy Moleskine notebook:

The exam room is snow-bright - the vast sheet of white behind the building reflects ths sunlight mercilessly. Twin lines of tracks, evidence someone blazed their way through the thigh-deep snow, criss-cross the field, reaching out toward a loading dock in one direction and the road in the other. Nearby a gazebo sits shrouded beneath a white crown. The tracks pass it by.

The snow-sheet, painfully brilliant to behold even with eyes squinted partly shut for protection, is beautiful, broad and unbroken except for the criss-crossing paths. Its surface is lightly decorated with crinkles from wind-blown snow drifting across its surface. The shadows of overhead power lines, barely visible above, stroke across the sheet.

A man in a Day-Glo yellow jacket and hood comes out to scrape ice from the loading dock's driveway. Against the backdrop of the snow-sheet he looks tiny, insignificant.

I never seem to get tired of writing about snow. I should use stuff like this in the story idea I had last month. I sure have written enough of it lately. Thankfully our forecast seems largely free of snow for the next week or so. I've enjoyed this winter stuff, I suppose, but I'm ready for spring. A friend online mentioned being eager for warm weather, the scent of freshly-mown grass, and birdsong. I second that. I can't wait until I can go out for a walk with only a light jacket, or hop on my bike and ride up to the bird sanctuary again.

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.