Nothing green

And then it snowed.

If you've ever lived where snow falls, you know why I love that Yeats poem. Or you know a little of it. People talk about the wild blue yonder and the endless sky, but if you want endless, you have to stand out in the open and look up into white infinity. If it snows at night, and you're near a city, you can look out into the dark and watch the sky stretch out pale before you, lit from beneath. There's something...still...about it that I can't really put into words.

I'm always glad when the days start warming up and the trees burst into life again, but this year I felt a little twinge of sadness about moving ahead into the hot months ahead. I don't know why. Of course, every year we get a late snow that (at best) buries the grass or (at worst) presses down the trees, crippling them and sending everyone out in the middle of the night in a panic, with brooms and shovels and rakes, to shake off the branches before they snap. So I shouldn't have been surprised last night when the fat rain drops turned to a drizzle, and then to downy flakes. I stood at the picture window that looks out of the dining room, into the backyard and onto my poor purple (and now icy) lilacs. The flakes were huge...The size of silver dollars. I was feeling somewhat annoyed by this fickle climate, as I leaned my forehead against the pane, but then I tilted my gaze up into the sky.

It was like being inside a snow globe--the cold glass against my temple, the huge flakes pouring down, nearly on top of me, out of an endless expanse of white. It was incredible. And I thought, Wow. Sometimes when things seem really shitty, all you really need to do is look up.