First Snow and Luci Shaw

 

That we've never gone south in January is a fact that should not be misunderstood--neither of us love frigid temps and that evermore dangerous slickness that attaches itself beyond the reach of snow shovels or blowers or blades. Winters are more treacherous with every passing year. Yesterday, I almost went down on a my way to church.

Still, there's something stark, something beautiful about the first snow. There'd been a powder a couple of weeks ago, but even though Friday night's much ballyhooed blizzard didn't fulfill a host of prophecy, it left us with a couple inches of new snow, the first of the winter, and made it hard not to take out the camera even though I knew getting good pics would be tough. 

Enough fell for a fine alabaster quilt, so I circled the south pond and went down to  the river, only to discover that I'd forgotten how a couple inches of snow makes a two-mile hike more than a little wearying. But I wasn't wrong--truth be told, surrounded by all that angelic richness, there wasn't much to shoot at.

By March, nothing that you see here at the riverside will be worth lugging a camera, but this whole virginal first snow has a peculiarly divine character that's perfectly charming. The world's white.

First snow gives long December shadows even more character, don't you think?

But I wouldn't be putting these pictures up if it weren't for Luci Shaw's Christmas card for 2021. She always sends a poem, and this year's little gem, "Snow," compliments the world of the first snow just outside our door.

Snow

With what calm and gentle grace

last night's fresh poem of snow

was laid across the land, whitening the hills, 

filling the simple spaces between

the birches. Fallen snow is an easy essay

in quietude, in anonymity. And when

the Baby came--He who carved 

those hills, who designed each lacy branch

on every tree, who shaped that uniquely

gleaming signal star borne from high heaven--

It was He whose splendor fell to earth,

simply and quietly as a flake of snow

tp bring to all our troubled, broken world

his gifts of grace and beauty. 

To be sure, the first snow on Luci's home turf in Bellingham, Washington, looks nothing at all like ours; yet, by way of her wonderful wide-angle lens, differences smelt away. 

Consider her poem a gift, as it was for me, as the brilliant first snow was for all of us--and as it was, I'm sure, for Luci.