Snow is lightly falling...

Where I live we hardly get snow of any great significance until the new year. However this year the First Snow made a very beautiful and put together entrance–six inches since yesterday and it is still floating downward. I am rambling though the misting swirls of white eddying through the air. Kicking up clouds of the light ethereal mixture, I watch the pure white showering up against the chocolate brown of my pant leg. Hearing the barely audible crystal swish, I can imagine why skiers love this kind of snow.

Wandering further from the abode of men, the peaceful quiet of the woods and meadows sweeps me into the magical silence known only when the whole world seems to be sleeping under its pure covering of white. Crossing the creek–lying still and quiet between the rounded bundles of the snow heaped banks beside it–I walk carefully, reluctant to create a splash in the tranquil water.

Following the trees that line the creek bank I draw nearer to the forest that grows up the hillside–a fortress of white with hints of green along its rounded sides. Pushing aside a gate of branches I enter a place of quiet magic. There is the sound of wings in a cedar near at hand and I freeze, watching the fluttering activity of a pair of robins. Hearing another conversation of a birdlike nature, I look into the branches of a walnut tree and see a pair of squawking blue jays. What are they talking about? Discussing my presence in their woodland home, perhaps?

Pushing onward I step out of the cedar wood into the open of the tall grace of the place where the walnuts and oaks reign. Sighting the tracks of some small mammal, I follow them back into the cedars, but any other traces of the animal to which they belong has disappeared, to my eyes at least. Just as soon I too will vanish from these woods, leaving nothing but a set of footprints in the snow. But not yet, for one thing I have lost my bearings. Not that I mind–it gives a thrill to temporally lose oneself in a place as magical as this. I am almost sure that if I go through that near curtain of trees I will come upon some fairy-tale abode.

Slipping through and under the cedar branches I come upon an open place ringed by magnificent snow laden cedars. Lying back in the deep snow, the still falling flakes tumble downward upon me, each seeming a perfect and lacy dancer against the backdrop of the white and green of the trees. Rising I go toward the edge of the woods, passing through into the beauty of the white pastures.

Turning, I look back toward the hedge of white and green and it is just as uniform and meshed as before, I passed through it, but my footsteps in the snow behind me are caught up into the forest trees. Tramping into the mouth of the north wind the snow stings as it never did within the forest, but there is a beauty and a life within that, too.

As I strike out across the pastures–that seem to be on the very top of this spinning globe on which we walk–I am snatched breathless into the swirling crystal wonder of God's creation.