Waiting for snow…
This winter has been warm, with scarcely any frost let alone snow. It has been warm, and it has been wet. Yesterday graced us here in the Pacific Northwest with a clear blue sky. My neighbor and I went out for coffee, and she remarked that traffic resembled summer densities with everyone finally getting a chance to go outside to enjoy a bit of warm sunlight. Sometimes clear skies will usher in colder temperatures, but I’m not seeing anything near freezing in the forecast. That doesn’t mean it won’t snow this winter. Sometimes we get snow in February, and I remember a recent year with snow in March. In this region, when the snow comes it may stay for a few days up to a couple weeks, but usually it’s a day or so and then it’s gone.
Maybe it’s because the snow is such an ephemeral experience here that makes it feel so magical to me. It doesn’t discolor into browns and yellows like in colder places. It’s a fresh white blanket that usually comes down in big volumes. Soon after the snow starts traffic slows and reduces to a fraction of the cars typically driving the roads. People here avoid driving in it, and they can because it lasts for such a short time. Snow radically transforms life here.
I was waiting, hoping for snowfall before writing about snow in this blog, but I’m not sure we’ll get any in the remaining two weeks. Snow sits comfortably in my top 10 favorite things about being alive. I’d place it somewhere near dogs and sunrises. Snow has never failed to make me happy, and I have never tired of seeing it. Do you know the song, A Marshmallow World? I sing it all day in my head, or loudly to myself when I’m driving, on repeat every time it snows!
It never quite fully feels like winter until there is snow. To me, winter seems almost to a be place rather than a time or a season. It’s a place of pale sunrises, a place of evergreen trees, a place where only few creatures hunt and forage, a place of the long dark, and a place where snow falls and drapes over every rigid and jagged edge rounding and softening and brightening the entire world in white. Winter is a blue place, a place to find a roadside tavern and sip cider or tea. Winter is a place of morning and night, with hardly a day at all. Winter is a Christmasy place, through which trains travel long distances across northern terrain. It’s a clean place. It’s a place to create and a place to dream.
It is undoubtably snow that makes winter a wonderous and wistful place. I long for the snow. I look at the mountains rising high above the ocean where I live and watch their snow covered caps change color as the light of the day casts them in blue shadow, warms them in rose then gold, and relieves them bright white against the blue sky. I can see the winter place from where I am in this wet and warm land of in-between-fall-and-spring. Winter reaches out to me from the mountains, and I want to go there where the snow makes it winter, and I wish for it to descend from those heights into the lowlands and brings us to into winter white with snow.
Late winter March snow of 2024…
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