Snow

All day it has been falling.  At seven this morning, it was light rain; by eight, white...drifting down like a Hollywood scene, covering us fast and lovely.  For a while, the children across the street were out, trying to rescue their dad's car, which had slipped sideways at the end of the drive, and some neighbors walking dogs or walking to town, booted and scarved and enjoying the kind of snowfall that feels good...crisp air, wet refreshing flakes, still manageable underfoot.

It kept up long past what we were led to believe...an inch or two, over by early afternoon, said the weather people, like last week's fall more a gesture than a storm.  The plows came and went, but all the tracks were soon covered, as if no one, no car, no sand, had ever passed this way.  All day we'd heard from the north, the west, the south and southwest...chilling cold, bright sun, the precipitation stopped after a few inches, promising better tomorrow.  But it's late afternoon now, and here the snow still falls, lighter, thinner but equally persistent.  Now and then a branch, overloaded, snaps and crashes.  At first we heard them, but now, we see only after the fact the deep impression it has made on the heightening cloud over the ground. 

At noon, I gathered some hazelnuts from the basket we keep for Alexander on the dining table, and threw them outside the front door under the sheltering eaves.  If the chipmunks and squirrels dare to come out of their hiding places, they'll have dinner, of a sort.  The birds haven't shown themselves yet either, but I know, as they do, where their repast will come from:  behind the ivy growth on the bark up the tall trees in the back yard, they'll peck out bugs enough for days.

Tonight, since it's my birthday, and no one else can brave the foot or more accumulated by now, not to mention our town's infamous steep, iced driveways, to help celebrate, my next-door neighbors are wading through from their kitchen door to mine for a winter dinner...a sort of curried rice and shrimp thing, a salad, some apple crisp.  They'll bring wine.  (I wish I had a fire to welcome them, but alas, it's the one thing this house is lacking...a fireplace...and I'm at cross-purposes trying to figure out where to put one, without losing a bank of windows.)

Meanwhile, the snow rises into a silence unmatched, cushioning us from all outdoors.  As I watched a movie to spend the quiet, it seemed as if there were no other world except the rooms of this house, its windows showing only snow broken now and then by the criss-cross of hyphenated tree limbs and high wires.  Snow falling in the air, snow lodged in the elbows of branches, snow piled high on what might be, underneath, rocks or cars or hibernating creatures.  Not eerie at all, just the long black and white emptiness of winter.

It's a sort of gift, I suppose, that bears waiting a while to unwrap.