Friday, January 8, 2010

It's snowing!


"It's snowing!"  The excitement of those words is almost electric -"it's snowing!"

 I part the curtains and look outside.  The air is filled with whirling, twirling white flakes, falling miraculously silently on the white carpet forming on the ground beneath them.  Visions of snow men, snow forts, snowball fights, and snow angels dance before my eyes - along with the thought of the warming hot chocolate in front of a wood-burning stove afterwards.

Can anything be more exciting than the alchemy of snow?  My backyard, dreary in winter: blasted pots of dead or dormant summer flowers, an empty swing, fallen leaves that escaped the last raking - suddenly frosted with glittering white snow, sparkling like diamond dust in the sun.   The snow-disguised outdoors becomes a new, unknown world to be explored: part ice palace, part primeval icescape.  The shrubs and trees are ice palaces, beckoning me to enter and look up at their frosty ceilings, with crystal icicle chandeliers and patches of blue sky showing through.  Everything is purified and transformed; the everyday becomes magical.

That's why I love walking in the woods in the winter.  Peace and solitude surround me, and the skeletal majesty of the trees and shrubs outlined in white makes me feel as though I am on holy ground, connected to the eternal beauty and good of the world.  Last week, Twin and I hiked through woods in Mapleton to see two waterfalls.  It was all so beautiful, I impulsively said we should come back every week.  Twin upped it to every five minutes.  The cascading water, bordered on either side with frozen rills, was unearthly in its beauty.  The rocks and boulders, the trees' naked branches - I sigh as I remember it.

The real world is always waiting, though.  Twin and I can't really go back every five minutes, or even every week, to those woods.  Back home, after a snowfall, eventually the snow starts to melt and get drab and dirty and reality seeps through.  That is why it is so important not to let these moments and days go unmarked, unexperienced.  Build a snow person, throw a snowball at someone you love, stand and look, really look at the trees and rooftops and branches and snowflakes.  Their half-remembered magic can carry you through some of reality's tougher times.

But there's plenty of time for reality later - right now: it's snowing!

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