Evening Snow
Granted, it gets in the way. It hampers my ability to drive and get where I need to go. I can think of things I’d rather do than trudge behind the roar of the snowblower up and down the driveway, but I have to admit – the snow is beautiful.
I was planning to stay indoors and nurse my cold tonight, but I couldn’t refuse those big hopeful brown eyes, and I dutifully put on my play clothes – ski mask, old worn out green hooded parka, St Louis Cardinals baseball cap (it keeps the hood from covering my eyes) and soft sheepskin mittens – and followed a very happy dog out into the back yard.
The fluorescent green of the tennis ball stands out in stark contrast to the pure white of the freshly fallen snow, and soon the back yard is criss-crossed with tracks. Jackson, his tail wagging like some animated radar antenna and his nose to the ground, runs in patterns that make sense to his canine brain, seeking, finding and retrieving, and dropping the prize expectantly at my feet, begging for me to throw it for him again and again.
It takes a few minutes, but eventually I notice the quiet. There’s a train passing in the distance, but that, and the tiny scratching of the snowflakes as they fall against my nylon parka are all I can hear. I love the silence, and I whisper a quick prayer of thank you to my Abba for the blessings – both for the silence, and the presence of mind to notice and appreciate it.
By this time the light of the day is beginning to fade, the colors retreating from the advancing evening and the world becomes black and white. The one visible exception is the window of a neighbor’s house, its warm yellow light bottled up like some amber liquid. It’s almost a living Currier and Ives, and I think to myself that only a fresh blanket of virgin white, framed here and there by the frozen black lines of tree branches could make something so simple as a lamp look so elegant, so warm, so inviting and so rich.
I discover these secret moments from time to time – the silent arc of shooting stars in the cold black sky of an early morning during the Leonid meteor shower, the delicate bloom of a Jack in the Pulpit discovered while walking solitary in the woods where no other person will pass to see it before it fades… it seems somehow a shame not to try to share it. I hope enough of the simple magic comes through in my clumsy words and warms you too, if ever so briefly.