Snow!!!

Can you believe it? The first real snow of the season. We have had a few flakes in the air before today, but not a white sky of dancing flakes! It almost feels like winter is here. Of course, it doesn't stick to the ground or make driving all that difficult.

What is there about first snowfalls that delights us so? Is it still the memory of a day off from school, the freedom we used to get from the daily drudgery and the plodding normality of day to day life that we recall? That doesn't happen for adults. We still get to go to work for the most part unless its absolutely horrible out. AND we have to drive in the slippery stuff. No vacation in that.

Is it the covering of all the bleak browns and bare trees with such pristine clean whiteness that appeals? Perhaps, but the snow does not stay pristine for long. Add the sand and salt from the road crews and soon enough white turns dingy and ugly. Could it be the cleansing of bugs and germs and bacteria that lifts our hearts? I hardly think that cause for outward joy, benefits notwithstanding.

So what IS it that makes us smile and fills us with happiness when the snow first begins to fall? Maybe it is a throw back to when life revolved around the seasons of the year. One worked hard in the spring preparing the fields and planting. Summer brought the back breaking labor of weeding and hoeing and watering. Fall meant hours of harvesting and preserving, picking, bending and carting heavy loads. But winter! Ah, winter is when you hunker down indoors by the blazing fire and mend your gear. It is leisure well deserved and a time of being at rest.

Maybe that is what we instinctively feel when those first few flakes begin to fall. The full larder, the abundance of our labor safely stored, the let-up in toil, the comfort of hearth and home. Yes, I think that must be it - our primitive recognition of times past, of the orderliness of creation, of traditions long observed.

Still, I can't help thinking how sparkly and pretty it all is in spite of the fact that my larder is not driven by seasons but by paychecks.