Under the giving snow blossoms a daring spring.
~Terri Guillemets
Category: snow
This Sunlit Ride
Although the snow still lingers
Heaped on the ivy’s blunt webbed fingers
And painting tree-trunks on one side,
Here in this sunlit ride
The fresh unchristened things appear,
Leaf, spathe and stem,
With crumbs of earth clinging to them
To show the way they came
But no flower yet to tell their name,
And one green spear
Stabbing a dead leaf from below
Kills winter at a blow.
~Andrew Young, “Last Snow”
The snow is ice-encrusts the morning
before it bids farewell under warming sunlight.
Winter encasing spring
grasping one last moment
of timelessness.
January 5, 1993
I embarrass our daughter annually on January 5 with her birthday story because it was so dramatic (for us!) and though she was the main character in the drama, it is all myth to her. Lea is 21 today! Inconceivable! Yet it is so and we celebrate the Author of the drama that ensured she would have many birthdays to come. Happiest of birthdays to you, Lea!
I couldn’t sleep that snowy stormy night even though I was not in earnest labor, and safely tucked into a hospital bed on the Labor and Delivery unit, my husband sleeping soundly in the other bed in the room. It had been plenty harrowing just getting to the hospital in a northeaster, getting stuck in a snow drift, and being dug out by a bulldozer. I knew our long-awaited third baby, over a week overdue, would be born the next day, blizzard or no blizzard, and then as soon as I could stand up and walk, we would head right back to the farm to our sons, where our neighbors were staying with them. At least that’s what I had planned.
It didn’t work out that way. Not even close.
This baby wasn’t going to enter the world without a little more drama. Instead of stoically agreeing along with me…
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A Canticle for Advent: The World is Sleeping
Still, still, still,
One can hear the falling snow.
For all is hushed,
The world is sleeping,
Holy Star its vigil keeping.
Still, still, still,
One can hear the falling snow.
Sleep, sleep, sleep,
‘Tis the eve of our Saviour’s birth.
The night is peaceful all around you,
Close your eyes,
Let sleep surround you.
Sleep, sleep, sleep,
‘Tis the eve of our Saviour’s birth.
Dream, dream, dream,
Of the joyous day to come.
While guardian angels without number,
Watch you as you sweetly slumber.
Dream, dream, dream,
Of the joyous day to come.
~Austrian carol
51 Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed— 52 in a flash, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed.
1 Corinthians 15: 51-52
It will be a joyous day of which we only dream in our current slumber. We will be changed, awakened from our stillness and sleep– not a mere disguising cover of snow, but forever cleansed and purified.
Vapoury Air
Yet one smile more, departing, distant sun!
One mellow smile through the soft vapoury air,
Ere, o’er the frozen earth, the loud winds run,
Or snows are sifted o’er the meadows bare.
One smile on the brown hills and naked trees,
Yet one rich smile, and we will try to bear
The piercing winter frost, and winds, and darkened air.
~William Cullen Bryant “A Sonnet –November”
Sun and Rain
Spring is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine…
~ Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden
Some days, this time of year, the skies are gray with indecision and it doesn’t rain nor does the sun ever shine, a truly lukewarm day. The days that are most interesting, however, are those that declare themselves “clear” or “soaking wet” and then switch somewhere in the middle. The transition itself is stormy.
Yesterday started with pouring rain — no drizzle this — with no hope of clearing, no peek of blue sky, no mountains on the horizon as they were covered in gray cotton wool.
Then in a mighty switch around noon, a wind blew in and took the gray away with a sweep of the hand. The skies cleared, the mountains reappeared with even more snow cover than the day before, and everything around shone with the glistening wash that had taken place.
It is spring, when all things are reborn wet and shimmering, sun shining amid the rain and rain drenching irresistible light.
Reciting Spring
Spring has returned. The Earth is like a child that knows poems.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
Thank God
the earth remembers the meter and rhythm of spring
and annually recites it from memory:
the tease of sun
warming cheeks,
a lapse back
into rain storms,
bulbs bursting
through frost,
surprised by snowflakes
maybe ice,
then a rainbow
through slanted light,
a few hardy buds
swell to blossom,
bees buzz sleepy,
all the while more rain,
painting green, always green
growing burgeoning flourishing.
The poem of earth reciting spring
declines to force a rhyme,
its buried words watered warm
to blossom just in time.
Lenten Grace — Pierced With Love
At the soft place in the snowbank
Warmed to dripping by the sun
There is the smell of water.
On the western wind the hint of glacier.
A cottonwood tree warmed by the same sun
On the same day,
My back against its rough bark
Same west wind mild in my face.
A piece of spring
Pierced me with love for this empty place
Where a prairie creek runs
Under its cover of clear ice
And the sound it makes,
Mysterious as a heartbeat,
New as a lamb.
~Tom Hennen from “In the Late Season”
And so, pierced by love, we begin the melt, readying for what is to come. The thaw shatters us into pieces, no longer iced up and untouched. A current of hopefulness now flows freely in deeply buried veins, warmed and pulsing.
Our hearts thrum. All will be new.
Delivered from a Drift
This is what we were about to go through together twenty years ago tonight… it feels as if it were just yesterday but here in our kitchen is an almost twenty year old redhead home from college and that means it wasn’t just yesterday. How could it be two decades ago that Lea was almost born in a snowdrift?
Sixteen years ago tonight I was a one week overdue, way too old pregnant lady, staring out the window at a 60 mile per hour northeaster, with horizontal snow. I was pondering whether I’d be delivering my own baby at home since it was looking more and more dismal that the roads would be passable with the piling snowdrifts. Recognizing some very minor early hints of labor, I called my obstetrician in town 10 miles away, and begged that I be allowed to come in “preventatively” to the hospital, so I wouldn’t have to sweat it out wondering if I would make it or not in time, or deliver in the middle of a snowdrift along the way.
Our faithful neighbor Sara Watson came with her daughter Kara to stay with the boys, and got quick lessons in how to run the generator if the power went out. Dan and…
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The Object of a New Year
The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
– G.K. Chesterton
We hoped for some timely snow for a white Christmas but had to be content with a brief flurry that didn’t stick. Then there was more hope yesterday on New Year’s Eve with more flurries and a few little skiffs left behind here and there, but nothing much. Instead of snow that stuck, we were stuck with the same old muddy bare ground and dead grass and weary frost-bitten plants.
It is natural to desire an easy transformation of the old and dirty to something new and beautiful: an all clean pristine white cottony sheet covering thrown over everything, making it look completely different than before. Similarly, at the tick of the clock past midnight on New Years’ Eve, we hope for just such an inner transformation as well, a fresh start, a leaving behind of the not-so-good from the past and moving ahead to the surely-it’ll-be-better in the future.
But it doesn’t stick, even if there is a flurry of good intentions and a skiff of newness plopped down here and there. Even if we find ourselves in the midst of blizzard conditions, unable to see six inches ahead and immobilized by the furious storms of life, that accumulation eventually will melt, leaving behind even more mud and raw mess.
It isn’t how flawless, how clean, or how new this year will be, but rather how to ensure our soul transformation sticks tight, unmelting from within, even when the heat is turned up and the sweat drips. This is not about a covering thrown over the old and dirty but a full blown overhaul in order to never to be the same again.
I lift my eyes to the hills where the snow stays year round: sometimes more, with a few hundred new inches over several weeks, or sometimes less, on the hottest days of summer. Our new souls this new year must be built of that same resiliency, withstanding what each day may bring, cold or hot.
Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…within my soul.
Barnstorming 