A Tale of Snow, Winter, Spring and Life Lessons

It actually snowed last night! Our ground looks white. The roads look fine, I think it melted on contact with the roadways, but there are probably a few icy patches so I'll be cautious when driving. I'm going to leave tire tracks on my driveway - DH "gave me permission" to leave "bunny tracks" in the driveway and he'll shovel them up later today. This is a quick storm - in and out and then back to our crazy winter once more. But it's really nice to awaken to the supreme silence that snow can bring. 

There's a silence to snow - it's like Mother Nature took 
her down comforter and pulled it over her head - pushing 
the world and all of its' sounds out and leaving the 
peace of total silence unmarred. 

Have you ever experienced that blanket that Mother Nature places over the world with snow? It dulls sounds, mutes them into the song of the stars so that you can hear and feel the rhythms of the cosmos much easier. It pulls color away and shows the world in shades of grey - brown-grey, black-grey, and all shades in between. The colors of Winter are unlike any colors for any other season. Every color in the neutral spectrum is contained within a 24-hour after a deep snow. 

There's something very restful about the neutral 
colors of Winter after the color riots of the 
other three seasons. It allows the palette to 
delve deeper into thought, and the body to reset 
for the challenges that lie ahead. We haven't had 
much of a winter up here in the Frozen Northlands 
this year, so having these few inches of snow 
is a relief. (We should normally have had 35-40 inches 
of snow so far this year, and we've had NONE 
until yesterday). 

This, isn't a "deep snow", this is only a few inches, and it's not sticking to the roadways at all, just the lawns and driveways of the houses fronting the roads. This is a baby snow - but it's a welcome one. It's on the far side of Winter, and will soon be gone, but it served to remind us that this year has been an anomaly - that rare thing in the Frozen Northlands. We've had an almost snow-free winter, and that's as rare as hen's teeth - in other words, it really doesn't happen. 

Winters up here without snow are as rare as hen's 
teeth, and this year was turning into one of the driest 
winters of our history. I'm grateful to see a few inches 
of snow on the ground. We desperately need the moisture. 
But, if we dive into a deep freeze, we'll lose trees and 
other plants that have sprouted early, and some of the 
animals are also ahead of schedule with their young. 

Our plants will be happy for the moisture that a snow brings, but our trees and plants will be confused. We've had a rare Green Winter, and many of them have already formed buds. If we get a truly deep freeze, it will be very hard on the trees. But I think we'll be all right. We're actually heading into the time of year when we usually see the most snow. But this crazy winter ... well, who can tell? We'll just take it as we take life - one day at a time. I'm off to the pool, have a wonderful Thursday and I'll be back tomorrow. Slava Ukraini and חיים למען ישראל.