I ventured out this morning for my daily four-mile sojourn at the height of this morning’s snow storm, perfect weather – 26 degrees, no wind, a heavy light snow. Quiet, little traffic, few others out, the occasional whiff of wood smoke. It’s one of my favorite times to be out walking. Of course, I’m sure that some who happened to be looking out their windows and saw me, bundled and trudging through the blizzard, thought me mad. Certainly my wife did as she asked upon my return, snow falling from my cap, ice caking my beard, if I had “really been out in that.” Yes, I had been out in that, through that. I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I can understand why European Christians chose the cold blanket of winter to celebrate their savior’s birth (despite all evidence that if it happened at all, it happened in the heat and dust of summer). Winter may well be a conventional symbol for death, but for me, especially when I can enjoy the comfort of a heavy snow without (as today) being required to drive in it, the season becomes wonderfully enlivening.
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Snow-Storm"
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