Snow Kidding

I woke early to pray for Palm Sunday service. Today we are doing Lessons and Hymns about Holy Week. We have many excellent hymns in our hymnal that we seldom sing, and I wanted to remind people of their excellent words, their meaningful portrayal of the events of Jesus' Passion. I love Ah, Holy Jesus; Go To Dark Gethsemane; O Sacred Head Now Wounded - all the events of that week poured out in stanza and refrain.

As I was praying for the musicians and pastor, I glanced out my bedroom window. In the early morning light, a deer munched the new green grass right at the edge of the woods. I smiled, then gasped. The heavens opened and poured down a deluge of white snow! The air became opaque with whiteness and the poor deer stepped back under the shelter of the leafless trees.

Later, after church, I was working on cooking a turkey for the formal dinner we always do for our graduating student workers (there's that formal china again!), and looked out the kitchen window dismayed to see big sloppy snowflakes swirling and dancing like someone had shaken a snow globe.

All during our dinner the snow filled the air outside the Fireside Reading Room. Not collecting on the ground. Just washing the sky. Good thing we had turned on the fireplace - we were downright cozy. Even the students mentioned how the picturesque snow clothed the evening with a brush of romance.

When at last the snow ceased, the blush of sunset was spectacular, as if the chill of the snow had reddened the sky's cheeks and turned the air brilliant with yellow, red and orange. And in the end, a bright full moon nodded graciously over the clean landscape as I drove home, weary but happy.