Snowing and snowing and snowing!

I just can't help it. I love the way it just keeps coming down. Friday it snowed in the morning for three hours after sunrise, and then by that afternoon had melted away. Saturday I woke up to grey skies, and snow drifting down. We went out to start building the new chicken coop, and the snow started to come down harder and harder, so we came back inside. Sometimes it comes down so hard you can't see; sometimes it is in little invisible pellets and sometimes big soft floating flakes. This morning when the sun shone dimly through the clouds, it reflected off of the snow on the verandah roof outside my bedroom window and lit up the room like a white and glowing fire. Last night when I walked the dogs, the faraway streetlight and the flashlight lit up the snow like glitter; it looked like every 'snow scene" I had ever made for my ceramic displays.

This weekend it has been fairly windless; only 10 to 15 mph. The snow eddies like dancing fairies in the breezes; swirling around in little gaggles, blowing away across the yard again once the dance is finished. You can almost hear the fairy music in the endless silence. Everything is muted in the soft cushions of snow; even the occasional car going down the gravel road sounds like it is whispering its presence.

You can always tell when the Cheneys have stoked their fire. In the morning the white smoke suddenly pours from their chimney. At night you can smell the fresh load of wood they've put in for the night. It is a biting smell that cuts across the cold clean air; not unpleasant at all. A home with 5 kids and one income, and they use wood to heat their home. They bank it down once it gets going, and you can't see any evidence, can barely smell it - a good use of product and ember heat. When you do it as a daily matter of course you don't waste time staring at a huge wasteful blaze.

This morning the snowfall is larger drifty flakes; coming down like the last remnants of a ripped-open feather pillow. It lies dry and light and soft on the ground, the house, like a good down quilt.

I can see why some folks hate snow; if you've lived in the city and seen it plowed up with sand and salt and rocks, shoved into piles and against curbs everywhere, turned into black and green slush with trash and unidentifiable objects scraped into it and frozen into garish piles or melting into a sticky morass - yeah, I would hate that too. Hate having to live around it, drive around in it, slip and slide and watching others do the slow careen from stopsign to stoplight, coasting through, swearing, banging, huffing of the snowplows that never seem to stop. Hate having to walk around the piles, falling into them, slipping and sliding on salted sidewalks and drives that have refrozen in the night, dodging the slippery spots from downspouts and overflows that have frozen into dangerous black and dingy glaciers - city snow is so different. Here all that happens is that an occasional car drives down the gravel road and leaves a dark-brown path that is soon covered over by the ongoing snowfall. Our footprints, the horses' hoofprints, the rabbit and turkey and antelope prints, fill in and become nothing more than obscure circles - and then - nothing.

Quiet, quiet, quiet. Today's a good day to bake and create things, sealed away from the world, MIA, grey and peaceful, soft and happy, in a world, a country, all my own.