In Which I Post a Few Pictures of the Wonderland that is Winter

Having spent six years of college in Florida and another two years working in North Carolina, I sometimes question the sanity of having come to (of all places) Minnesota.

I don’t like being cold.

Silly me.

I’m not one of those adventurous explorer types who merely need sufficient layers. I’m more of a hunker-down-and-watch-netflix-til-spring, hibernation type. That admitted, I took a brief walk on Saturday, two days following a crazy snowstorm that attempted to bury my town in white driftiness.  This is what I saw:

In Which I Marvel at the Beauty of Snow

Snow….
I knew it would return. And boy, did it ever.
Cancelled school, traffic delays, general insanity. And such incredible beauty.

I finally saw it.
Long have I loved Frost’s poem, “Birches;” and I’ve often imagined the scenes he describes. And today I saw it. It was snow instead of ice, but today, for the first time ever, I saw trees that truly looked

“Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.”

And it was magical.

It was the kind of snow that causes pine branches to snap beneath the weight of white; the kind that makes trees look like debutantes at a ball–curtseyed low with heaps of white crinoline spread before them; the kind that makes me want to beg the light to linger just a little longer so I can watch it dance through the snow-encrusted limbs of wintered trees; the kind of snow that Robert Frost would write poetry about…

Exquisite.
Unfortunately, this was the only picture I was able to snap before my battery died, and it does no justice to the breathtaking beauty of the world that was today.

In Which the End is Nigh

These are moments of glad grace when the snow begins to melt and winter gives up a sunny day to tease our hearts with the hope of spring.

No one wants to be indoors today. The air is too fresh. The sky is too blue. The sun is too bright. The moderation of cold is too brief.

Tomorrow it will all freeze over again. The bleak grey will return and I will forget the sparkling joy of looking out the window and catching my breath with inward soaring flight. To-dos and should-have-dones will march down their respective lists of attention absorbing demands.

But for this moment, I will savor the memory of mist blanketing the snow in hazy morning glow. An owl in silhouetted feathered fluff perched on a fence post, framed by a field of melting white.

Winter has not yet ended. But in this moment, I know that eventually it will.