The first snow of the season started coming down as I hurried to substitute for a colleague’s 8 am class this morning – Seamus Heaney-esque sleet-milt came in pats and splats against the umbrella, white rims thickening. By the time I left the building it had thickened to actual snow, soft and fast and intent on car hoods and bent, hurrying heads. Now it’s quieted and I can’t stop looking away from the papers in front of me to stare out my tower window at the white layered onto grass and trees by the wind. I know it’s thicker in the open places. I know it’s thinner in the woods, where the wind might not yet have touched, and where the grass underfoot still holds a little of its last-of-summer-into-fall yield and spring. I had forgotten the particular light of a gray snowy day, iron and austere and somehow bracing. Here it is again, the forward turn of the wheel.
2 thoughts on “First snow, new light.”
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As that colleague for whom you substituted… thanks! 🙂 The first snow – especially that wet, dense kind – is for me often an inspiring and energizing experience. Just as the first fall colors serve as a kind of temporal marker of the accelerating academic year, so that first wet snow somehow signals a time to hunker down and settle in for a winter of reading, grading, writing, analyzing, etc… 🙂
Me too. And somehow, at least at first, it weirdly _energizes_ me for those things! thanks for reading, T!