Snows Bring Spring
The leaves of fall are fallen, the tamarack’s needles are nearly all gone, the colors of the world fading to dark greens, blues, tans and greys. Winter is nigh upon us, even the air smells like the flat fluff of snow to come. The threshold of another winter, the dying days of the year, the winding down, the still onset of death that leads to life. Seasons come and go, each one bleeding smoothly over into the other with little fanfare or lines. But winter is different, it is a definitive and clear change, one day there is merely the drab tiredness of fall and the next snow falls from the sky like feathers shot from the wings of angels.
How can you discount magic as real when snow exists? Clouds freeze into crystal-spiders and fall gentle and looping to Earth. As children we look up at the clouds and wish we could climb on them, explore their forbidden ranges and caves, slide down their sides which must be soft as enchanted marshmallows. There is a part of us that never quite recovers from learning this dream is impossible, a sadness we carry for the rest of our lives, only rarely awakening it. If you’ve ever taken the time to be lost in the view from a window seat on a plane you know what I mean. Those sunlit clouds stretching for miles below the heavy metal wings, like the fields of a forgotten dream, and the desire comes back to us. If only we could step out of this gravity defying metal coffin and walk on those fields. Then perhaps, our souls whisper, we would know the answers to everything.
But we are adults, these thoughts do not become us and we return to our inflight movie ignoring the miracle of the world that is all around us.
We forget that the clouds take pity on us terrabound humans and so do their best to give us a taste of their world. Afterall what is snow if not frozen clouds? “Because I could not stop for death he kindly stopped for me.” The world is dead, the grass is dead and the trees sleep with hibernating bears dug in keeping their roots warm. It is an end but it is not the end. This is death leading to resurrection, God’s blessing of sleep over the land to prepare it for the dancing, shouting, riot of life it will bring forth when the Chinook winds tear back this white mantle and awake the seeds in the mud.
But that is months away, nearly a whole half year for my little corner of the world, the mountains here collect rain and snow about themselves like cloaks. Peering out from their cold coverings at a world that moves on.
The deer are beginning to rut, bucks growing more oblivious and stupid as they chase and trail and fight. They know what the sharp twang in the air means, even as the land dies they seek to kindle life as God created them to, a life growing and blooming slowly until in spring it comes forth and the deer of the future find themselves in a world of green and glory. We’ve been hunting them, grateful for their stupidity and thinking of summer sausage and jerky. The snow will make the hunting easier.
Day dawns slow and grey, large, hazy flakes fill the air, blocking out the mountains, covering the ground, exciting the children who buzz with excitement, trying to find their sleds stored away from last spring.
Adults are a little less enthusiastic, they feel the excitement of the children deep in their souls, they were long ago children themselves after all, but maturity masking itself as wisdom dampens this thought. The old wisdom from the rooted-in natives of the Idaho Panhandle is that we only truly have two seasons: Winter, and getting ready for winter. At the first snow everything that isn’t quite ready for winter springs to mind like a jaw trap. Coffee is brewed (Black as night, drink it like a real man) and the fledgling elements of the season are braved in a scramble to put away and clean up anything you don’t want buried. This first snow won’t last, true, not until all the yellowed needles fall off the tamaracks, but it will soon and like the squirrels we pack away what we need.
Nights will lengthen and days shorten and woodstoves will be lit, the snapping corpses of the burning trees doing battle with the cold, driving it from our houses and bones. The long dark is settling in, the wind growing teeth, snowmobiling and skiing linger in the near future. Silent as the passing of time the snow falls and builds.
Sleep is the cousin of death so they say and if that be the case snow is his garment. The cloak of the Reaper is grey, not black, grey and soft but cold and he drapes it over the earth like a net to catch what he may and take it away to present to his King.
Life, death, resurrection. Summer, winter, spring. Creation, fall, redemption.
Such is the pattern of the world, echoing the soul of God for us sinners to see.
