First Snowfall

We awoke this morning to a light snow on the surfaces of everything in our yard, first revealed by the excited spectacle of white tops on our cars when I turned on the spotlights at 6:30 a.m.  It was a beautiful snow, continuing all morning and coating everything, transforming common objects into amazing new creatures.  The table and chairs on our deck have thick white cushions, which seem like another world, far removed from those summer days where we sat and put up the umbrella to shield us from the late-afternoon sun.

Everything looks just a little bit like those Hasui woodblock prints, especially the arbors and pergolas which already have an Oriental backbone.

And the fence-posts have donned Pope's mitres.  Snow hangs impossibly from the tomato-cages that only a few months ago contained the vines of grape tomatoes.

It finally seems like winter.  The power even went off for two hours - I dragged the generator outside the basement in readiness, then sat in my study by the window in the waning afternoon light reading back-issues of The New Yorker - returning suddenly to remind us how much we had been enjoying Christmas music and decorations.

It is a good day for reading.  Those New England poets I grew up with come to mind on a day like this as our woods fill up with snow.

"Whose woods these are I think I know.   

His house is in the village though;   

He will not see me stopping here   

To watch his woods fill up with snow." - Frost 

 

 

“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.”- Emerson

 

"It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs." - Wallace Stevens