Long Winter

Following up on the near-title of my last post and it's awful alliteration, it is snowing here again today. I was thinking of the snow previously because of a past memory. When I was seven or eight years-old, I wanted to go outside and play in the snow at night. Our backyard was safe and secure, so my mother let me get bundled up and out I went.

My memory of that night is clear. Our normally busy street was silenced by the day's snowfall. It was cold, but not uncomfortable. I walked around the yard by the light of the porch. Suddenly I noticed the light from a different angle against the snow, and I looked closer. I could see the individual shapes of the snowflakes. I was amazed. I had always thought that the paper cut-outs we made in school were a human representation of snow, like the trace of my hand could be a turkey and a bunch of triangles stacked were a Christmas tree. I was thrilled to see those flakes and yes, the rumor was also right: no two were the same!

I looked up at the light over our door, and all of a sudden I felt an overwhelming sense of peace. The silence, the cold, the beauty that was around me but small enough to bypass all came forward in a moment of clarity. I remember it making me feel uncomfortable, and I soon went back inside the house. The enormity of it was incomprehensible to me then, but powerful enough to remain in memory, clear as the sky.

Last week it was my birthday, and like many of the birthdays I celebrated in the past, it snowed. The weather was supposed to be ugly and tough to deal with. I have been told by several sources that the only reason I like snow is that I don't have to shovel it. There could be truth to that, but I like to believe it's because I appreciate the beauty of it and don't like to see it as a nuisance.

I left the house early on my birthday and stood for a moment on our front porch, which is eerily like the one wrapped around my parent's house all those years ago. The snow fell, and it sparkled. Just like the sparkle of those fallen flakes that retained their shapes. I stood in the silence of our street, again, another busy street silenced, and watched. I could see the shapes again, I could see it sparkle. In the quiet of the morning I realized what a gift I was given. It was a reminder of that peace, that silence. It reminded me that some moments always remain with you, and having those moments is a blessing.

I watched the snow for as long as I could before I had to move on to other things, like work. When I was a kid, I broke the moment because I couldn't handle it, or understand it. Now, as an adult, I had adult things to attend to, so the moment was gone. But the feeling remained all day. I felt fortunate to know that sometimes you miss the beauty that is all around you, but it is still there if you want to come back to it.