Vignettes: Winter
The snow lay on the ground. The little girl walked softly, deliberately through the snow, her footprints drifting this way and that. Ocassionally, her line of tiny footprints intersected with the even tinier scurry of a squirrel, hop of a bunny, or brush of an owl’s wings as it surprised the tiniest mouse.
Martha smiled at her daughter’s wanderings and breathed in deep, collecting the brisk January morning air into her lungs as if she was filling her tin with blueberries in July. Plink, plank, plunk.
She glanced back behind them, charting their traverse through the field full of deep and drifting snow. There were no straight lines in her life anymore. She’d given up on things being linear years ago. Instead, like their morning wanderings, she, too, was going this way and that. The evergreen trees beyond the field framed their landscape just as the mountain beyond framed the trees, each threshold a widening circle of beings. She glanced up at the sky, robin’s egg blue and so clear. It would surely freeze hard tonight. Her friend called these cold, clear sunny days “bluebird days” - as in, imagine an old-timer saying crustily, heartily, delightedly, “It’s a real bluebird day out there.” Was it because of the blue sky? Do bluebirds even stick around in winter? She decided she didn’t need to know why exactly, but she sure was appreciating the blue.
Winter in the Northeaset in the age of climate change had turned into seemingly endless months of brown. Brown trees, brown mud, rain instead of snow. Gone were her own childhood days of mountains of snow to climb up, replaced by infrequent surprise mornings of messy half-snow, half-ice days. Her daughter didn’t seem to mind. At four-years-old, she was happy enough with the enough snow to pat into a ball with her small gloved hands, snow pilling into the tiniest of snowballs that she ate off her fingertips. The rare foot of snow that had fallen the night before was a delight to both mother and daughter. In it, they could wander together through soft moments, refreshed by white, content to just be.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Noticing Along The Way to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.