Yesterday brought us our first real snow.
Only a dusting, true; everything that was on the ground is already long gone. Even the lower half of the mountain slopes are bare of it, but the peaks are still lightly frosted, as though the sky spirits decided to sprinkle powdered sugar over them.
There is also, remarkably, a bitter north wind blowing today, and that, at least, is keeping that dusting in place at the higher elevations. Down here, it merely slices through clothes and skin, straight to the bone . . . and yet, the ambient air temperature itself is warmer than one would expect. Tonight’s low, however, will likely be much colder than it has been up to now, and if the forecast holds, there is a chance of four days of intermittent snow showers beginning on Friday.
We should be getting snowstorms by now, not merely showers, but after the unseasonal brutality of recent months [and years], we’ll take what we can get.
Here, this day dawned wrapped in fog and sun simultaneously, a low shimmering haze at once opaque and tantalizingly holding out a hint of translucence — the kind of luminous veil that makes one believe there must be something wondrous on the other side. It’s no wonder old stories tell of those who are lured away by such types of atmospheric glow. Now, in the afternoon, the sun shies brightly even as the wind cuts deep, driving rolling banks of dark gray clouds around and behind peaks and horizon on all sides: here, an isolated snowstorm whipped up across the elevated flats to the northwest, there, a mist of pure white white swept up by alpine winds to cloak the evergtreens along the eastern ridgelines.
The calendar still says fall, but today speaks, less a whisper than a shriek, only of winter.
Such conditions lay the groundwork for a glorious twilight, one last gift of fire in the face of the impending deep cold of the dark hours. At this time of year, and with no snow left on the ground, it washes the land in shades of molten gold and amber, gilding willow branches and limning leafless aspens in silver. It turns the cloudy skies from the grays of dove and charcoal into haunting and haunted moody blues: slate, indigo, violet, midnight blue showing itself in the last of the day.
It’s a color combination found in the image that is the subject of this week’s Monday Photo Meditation, one that Wings shot in digital format four years ago. Four years ago to the very day, as it happens, although I didn’t realize that at the time I chose it for this day’s post: November 20th, 2019. That was a slightly better year, weather-wise, than the one prior, although nothing that could be remotely described as “normal” for this place and time. But in an autumn that had been markedly bereft of appropriate weather, I remember our relief at the arrival of at least a passing storm. As I recall, it delivered no more than a few flurries, but it was something — a bit like our current conditions, in that anything at all is a vast improvement.
Such are the ravages of a twelve-hundred-year drought.
But it wasn’t only the flurries that were welcome; it was also the beauty of stormy late-autumn skies. It was the medicine of the light the snow leaves behind, something that seems not entirely of this world, yet a gift to us all the same.
Seeing this image now is melancholy for us, too: The drought has since mostly killed all four trees. Three had a few new low fronds this summer; a fourth, as nearly as I could tell, is already gone. Still, the birds find use for it, as will the insects and other small creatures, and so it will be allowed to remain standing with its siblings. It will no longer be the same sort of magnet for the light, but that does not erase its value in other ways.
And who knows? Perhaps we’re wrong; perhaps there is just enough life left in its lower trunk, like those of the other three, that a decent winter might revive it next year. It’s a problem we cannot solve now, either way, and so the best that we can do is to pray for the snow, and to ensure that what the winter gives us is put to best use.
That lesson, too, is its own form of the light the snow leaves behind: knowledge that is perhaps not welcome, but also the wisdom to act upon it anyway.
~ Aji
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