The First Snowfall

There is something magical about the first snowfall of the season. Although it signals the start of a long, hard winter in Wisconsin, there is joy in the snowflakes and laughter in the skies!

Like a child, I wish to run outside and twirl around and to catch a snowflake on my outstretched hand!

Instead, I go out and take a drive to the nearby grocery store, dodging slushy puddles in the parking lot and keeping the windshield wipers in constant motion so I can see.

I buy some eggs for making dinner and then a bunch more. I am in the mood to stock up on food items while I am out in case the rest of the week is like this. I have this sudden desire to stock up on food and create a nesting place at home for the cold days ahead.

When I return, the rooftops are white, as though painted by some invisible hand. Only tiny, green shoots of grass poke out of the thin, white blanket on the ground. They stick their heads out for one last look at the earth, before they will have to settle under the snow and sleep until spring.

That is winter in Wisconsin for you. And I love it.

With every turn of the season, the Lord lets us write something new upon our lives. He gives us a fresh start to make of our lives something beautiful and enriching for others. “There is an appointed time for everything, and a time for every affair under the heavens…A time to seek, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away” (Eccl. 3:1, 6).

Casting away is always hard, but it brings with it the freedom of detachment and the coming of new surprises and adventures. As children gleefully exclaim about the falling snow, we can join them and the angels in singing hosannas as the earth is purified and baptized in white. “Though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow” (Is. 1:18).

From an unfinished draft of a poem I wrote:

The skies are shedding feathery snow,

Drawing closer the chambers above with those below,

Clothing the earth in bridal white and veiling you in lace of light.

Snowflakes, falling and landing on your uncovered head,

Blink under the street lamps – like pointed stars that

Twinkle in the night and then melt into the coming dawn –

So they glisten on your hair, suspended in Time for a precious, fleeting moment,

And I wonder aloud at nature’s touch of snowflakes on your hair.

I hope that we take delight in these magical moments of the turn of another season and stop to notice, and be amazed.