Some southerners, like me, love snow. Granted, the rest see it as a nuisance. In my view, though, snow is so infrequent that I want to make the most of it. From all the sledding videos posted on Facebook, I'd guess that a lot of other folks feel the same way.
Some winters, we host raucous sledding parties on our home hill. Neighbors of all ages come out and spend one, two, three hours giddily sliding down the driveway, then trudging back up with a big grin on the face, ready to do it again. We wouldn’t think of taking our cars out on this hill until the gravel starts to peek through the snow layer—not because it’s dangerous, but because we don’t want to ruin the sledding!
This weekend we had our first, and very possibly only, snow of the winter (there have been plenty of winters without any). Sledding has been very good. In addition, I’ve been taking long walks in the spare white woods. Thankfully, the icy snow did not stick to the trees this time; that certainly can amp up the beauty, but it also causes a lot of damage.
What’s been knocking around my brain as I crunch through the white woods is the paradox, if you will, of snow: it obscures but it also reveals. The ground is densely--even deeply--covered, yet I can see things I could not before!
Some winters, we host raucous sledding parties on our home hill. Neighbors of all ages come out and spend one, two, three hours giddily sliding down the driveway, then trudging back up with a big grin on the face, ready to do it again. We wouldn’t think of taking our cars out on this hill until the gravel starts to peek through the snow layer—not because it’s dangerous, but because we don’t want to ruin the sledding!
This weekend we had our first, and very possibly only, snow of the winter (there have been plenty of winters without any). Sledding has been very good. In addition, I’ve been taking long walks in the spare white woods. Thankfully, the icy snow did not stick to the trees this time; that certainly can amp up the beauty, but it also causes a lot of damage.
What’s been knocking around my brain as I crunch through the white woods is the paradox, if you will, of snow: it obscures but it also reveals. The ground is densely--even deeply--covered, yet I can see things I could not before!
One of these suddenly revealed things is that there is a lot of “stuff” that falls from trees on a regular basis. Red-bud pods, pine seeds slipped from their cones, pine cones, sweet gum balls, pine needles, shredded old beech and oak leaves (the last hangers-on), bits of broken branches, bracts from tulip poplar “cones,” red-cedar berries. . . . I know these just fell because the ground is completely white. Think of it: There is a constant gentle rain of life-detritus, of which we are unaware, most of the time.
Well. This snowfall has not melted away yet, and I'm looking forward to what will be revealed tomorrow.