Snow Shrinks

Snow doesn’t always melt. Yesterday the air was full of snow. We moved through the woods in Nordic tracks on our skis, pushing our poles down and our feet forward, the snow icing our hats and collars and shoulders. Snow was the foreground and the background, a soft filter of white atoms we breathed and billowed.

Today the sky is the clear blue of a prayer, and the green and brown pine tree tops are lined with white and it all pops against that blue. The snow on the ground that yesterday was heaps of heavy, fine, soft, cold powder compacted by its weight, weightless in the air, but weighty enough to land and pile, ice dust on ice mote, fairy crystal on frozen bonded hydrogen and oxygen atom, drifts and deeps too high to walk in without effort yesterday – today it is all intact, but somehow all of it smaller. Acres and miles and counties of snow spread out untouched by rain or plow, now simply shallower, reduced in volume and depth. Between then and now the snow simply shrank.

This is a trick of air, something as simple as evaporation, but something as marvelous and undetectable in its transfiguration as a leaf opening. We are used to friction, to our contact and agitation and intervention to make things happen and change. Here, overnight, without fanfare or noise or movement beyond the invisible transfer of atoms, the snow departed. A kind of evanescence, a quiet transference, like a face with a smile you didn’t see appear; it breathes a kind of peace. In its insubstantial yet palpable change, there is an immortal assumption of power and movement very far beyond our human need for noise and impact to make a difference.