Mother Nature's Cold Creation

Dear Shell,

Snow is a funny creation of Mother Nature. Snow is cold and wet, it soaks through your clothes and into your skin, until your very bones are chilled. Your nose turns red, your fingers turn white with cold. Uncontrollable shivers take over your body. You crawl under a mound of covers and lay there cursing the snow that covers your world outside the front door.

Snow can be very dangerous, especially when it turns into ice. It makes the roads so slick that people cannot keep their cars on the road. They slide into the ditches, or worse into other cars. It can take hours to travel a distance that normally takes a short time. People slip and fall going from their house to their car or vice versa. Snow and ice can be brutal, unforgiving killers.

Then there is the other aspect of this deadly creation. Snow is beautiful. It is absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful. The world outside the front door is covered in a blanket of sparkling white. The trees are no longer bursting with green life, instead they stand tall and proud in their winter slumber, stark limbs dusted with white. The snow brings a clean smell to the brisk air.

Monday morning, I was out at 4am, shoveling the snow off our driveway. It is not a chore I enjoy, and normally J is the one who handles it. But Monday morning, at 4am, there I was with shovel in hand, pushing the snow off the driveway and into large piles along the side. The air was crisp and clean. The snow reflected the light from the street lamps and seemed to glow around me. It was quiet in the neighborhood; everyone was asleep.

I stopped at one point and just stood in the driveway and looked around at what seemed to me at that one moment in time, to be a magical world covered in sparkling winter fairy dust.


Shell