What a lovely picture those verses paint. We sat at our little bistro table last night lingering over dinner and watching the falling snow through the screened window as it piled up on our deck:
- "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
- Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
- Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
- Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven,
- And veils the farm-house at the garden's end.
- The sled and traveller stopped, the courier's feet
- Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
- Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
- In a tumultuous privacy of Storm."
This morning we awoke to about eight inches of snow. I have never lost my love for the magical transformation that snow brings to the most ordinary of objects: the white gnome cap on St. Francis, the birdhouses snowbound, too. So before I shoveled the sidewalk and driveway - the adult excuse for "going outside to play in the snow" - I walked around marveling at the changed world of our little kingdom behind the fences.
Our little tabby Coffee does not like the snow. She walked only on the rock walk and driveway that I had shoveled, and when she stepped on a little bit of snow she would stop and shake it off her paw as vigorously as she could. But I was enjoying myself so much that I shoveled far more than I needed, remembering my childhood in Connecticut and the epic storms (or so it seemed at the time) that stopped everything in their tracks including Highway 5 to New Haven. My brother and I, budding entrepreneurs, would venture out with our snow shovels and make good money (by 1960s standards) offering to shovel driveways in the neighborhood. The air so quiet!- Emerson's "tumultuous privacy of snow." I seemed to be living in the middle of a Japanese woodblock prints by Hasui:
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