There’s something magical about seeing the first snow flake falling. At that moment, you and nature are joined in a special secret only shared by those who look out their windows at just the right moment. The first flakes are few, and dance lightly about in the breeze, like the tip of a tongue during foreplay. Moving here, no there, no here.
As the snow falls I watch the pattern of the wind, no longer limited by my crude perceptions that tells me the wind is blowing in a straight line from here to there. The snow traces the currents, a waltz of breezes.
During the day, through my window I watch a father take his child for her first walk in the snow. Hesitant footsteps made a little more unsure by suddenly uneven footing that shifts about and causes her to fall. Cruel! But then there’s that moment when tiny face is turned up into the snowfall for the first time; gently, cold touches sweep across cheeks and wisps of cotton at lashes and falls and melts in mouth opened to cry out in pure discovery. All is forgiven, and another child is found winter.
Better than watching the first flake, I love to go to bed with bare streets and wake up in the mornings knowing that snow has started falling. You can hear it by the absence of sound, and you can see it through your window as streetlight reflected. Pulling back the curtain, you look out on a world of white, lines softened between objects until the differences are erased. All you see is soft, crystalline mounds, sparkling in the light.
Snow brings with it a hint of Mother tucking us in against the cold, and a promise of waking.
