The snow wore itself out during the night and the morning dawned flawless and quiet. The sun was bright all day, the sky a clear, robin’s egg blue, and the wind blew crisp. A quick trip this morning to the post office in Hermosa, camera in hand, yielded a gorgeous view of distant Harney Peak. The mountain rose silver out of a black expanse of pines. To the north, Mt. Rushmore was clearly visible, not yet shadowed over by Harney Peak.
The trees along our driveway cast beautiful blue shadows across the road, and a doe stood stock still in the middle of the driveway as I approached. When I stopped the truck to see about getting a picture of her, she lost track of her own feet and nearly took a spill in the snow, before recovering and speeding effortlessly off. I got out and looked around. Such a changeable landscape from season to season. The familiar driveway, the well-known bends and curves of the gravel road, the pines and chokecherry and red rocks are so changed when bathed in snow and chill blue light.
Snow fell quietly from branches of the pines and a four-point buck bounded through the trees on the hills above me, then disappeared from sight. Golden sunlight sifted through the trees, glinting and dazzling. Clouds of powder snow glimmered and sparkled, sifting with the sunlight, scattering to the wind. Snow clung to the pine needles, and covered the red rocks with glistening white caps, and blanketed the red ground. Grasses and sage poked up through the snow.
The grasses and once-flowering plants seem to take on new life in the winter. The color of summer melts away with the first frosts of autumn and winter, but what remains is a delicate silver memory of what was there in the warmer months. The foliage dries and a new sort of flower shimmers in the cold winter sunlight, or peeks from blue shadowed places beneath the bluff. How beautiful everything is in the winter! The remaining silver-brown stalks and leaves and buds seem to belong to the snow, like a flowering blue flax seems to belong to the green grass in the summer.
Chapped hands, tingling toes, and smarting ears are a small price to pay for glimpses of the subtle beauty of the winter. The cold is worth the beauty that winter affords.
In the winter, though, when the snow flies and the drab brown of late fall is buried, a new sort of life appears. It is found in the subtle play of lights and shadows, the flicker and glint of ice, the sifting magic of the falling snow, the bewildering and enchanting shades of color found in a drift of snow or in the shadows beneath the trees, the lavender and pale blue and silver and grey and amethyst. The few hours of warm light call out what hardy animals remain above the earth, and they bask while they can in what warmth they can find.
And then, at the end of the day, when the light is just right, the memory of fall is recalled, the memory of the end of the summer – gold and red and rich brown and the sagey green of lichen. That lasts only minutes before the sun disappears behind the hills and a deep blue shadow spreads out over the valleys.
As lovely as the snow is by day, I find the glimmering whiteness even more enchanting by the light of the moon, when the silver light filters through the bare branches of trees, casting strange and silent shadows on the flawless snow. Instead of blinding brilliance, the ground glints with a cold, unearthly sort of a light. The moonbeams seem to stream from the sky in a transparent flood, and the very air seems richer, almost as if it could be cupped in the hands and tasted.
The cold seems less significant in the moonlight. I don’t know why. But with the cloudless sky winking with stars and the snow winking with diamond-light, the moon streaming silver and the wind hushed about the trees, unmoving and silent, the cold seems reluctant to chill or burn or bother. When I lift up my face to the moonlight, with the snow glowing and reflecting and shimmering, I almost feel that my face could be washed by the light.
The spell of the first snow, as fragile as a snowflake dissolved by a single, warm breath, has faded in the warmth of the springlike November air, unseasonably mild and sweet. Ice remains on the creeks and lakes, in places where the sun doesn’t reach, holding fast to the sheltered banks, but slowing giving way to the water. Only patches of snow cling to the northern slopes of hills and beneath the branches of trees, like memories of shadows.
Song Dog Journal 