Dances with Snow

What strange weather we're having! It was forty degrees earlier this morning when David and I got up. Now I look out the window and big fat flakes of snow are falling, prompting me to check the thermometer again: thirty-six.

I love watching snow fall, at least when it's not falling thickly while I'm trying to drive a car on a highway with a long way to go to reach my destination. Maybe it's that snow still triggers some childhood delight; maybe it's partly because it amazes me that a snowflake, which is so near to being weightless, still has enough "gravity" to fall earthward (though some snowflakes, probably the driest ones, drift and dawdle their way down). Maybe it's knowing a little bit about the beautiful and delightful mysteries of snow crystals--that each one is unique, although more like countless unique variations on a theme.

I once gave my father, a guy who read, really read, Scientific American for fun and did the geeky math puzzles that were toward the back of every issue (am I making that up?), a book about snowflakes. I remember finding it in the Harvard COOP and thinking it was the coolest book! After my father died, and when my mother was moving house and trimming down her belongings a bit, I brought that book back to my house, happy to have it on my shelf.

It's a collection of plates from the photographs of "Snowflake Bentley," a Vermont gentleman, self-educated farmer and photographer who invented a way of photographing snowflakes and contributed greatly to our knowledge of their multi-variant designs. He also caught a few plates of frost on window panes--another marvel! Tree branches! Fern fronds! He's now the subject of at least one children's book and maybe even a museum in Jericho, Vermont, his longtime home.

As if that weren't reason enough to be entranced by snow, there's also more recent research that suggests that the molecules of a snowflake "know" how to go about building a particular crystal by communicating with each other through vibrations, almost musically, or dancingly!

Chet Raymo's book Honey From Stone includes the following lyrical descriptions of this phenomenon:

     "Careful studies have shown that on the atomic scale the snowflake is a frenzy of activity. The molecules of  water furiously wing their hydrogen arms like dancers in a tarantella. The electronic bonds between the molecules are made a broken a million times a second. Faults in the crystal . . . jump from place to place like unruly children in a teacherless classroom. And somehow, in the midst of this atomic caprice, the snowflake acquires and retains an ordered form.

     "Some physicists think that vibrations of the crystalline lattice are the instrument of communication, vibrations that are exquisitely sensitive to the shape of the crystal. If this is so, then the growing snowflake maintains its symmetry in the same way that members of an orchestra stay in consonance, by sharing the sound of the ensemble. The snowflake's beauty, then, is orchestral! The facultas formatrix is vibration. Nature shudders in its sublimity. Atoms dance to inaudible music. The cloud jams. The rock jives. The lake's still surface boogie-woogies."

And so it seems to be--as others, inspired by quantum physics, would also claim--all matter is energy vibrating! Indeed, everything is energy vibrating! Thoughts, moods, the stories we tell ourselves, what we believe about ourselves and our lives. And if energy vibrating, then far more malleable than we're apt to think. We can change the music, the tune, the dance. We can dance with the snow.

Seven Inches Before Breakfast

"Trees in Snow" c. Sukie Curtis, 2/3/09, graphite pencil

We woke to seven inches of snow--more than the predicted overnight fall--and it's still snowing thickly. I have to say I'm delighted. Just when everyone (store clerks, bank tellers, neighbors, and so on) was beginning to mumble and to speculate about a nearly snowless winter, or about whether we'd be slammed in February and March, we've got a real "snow event" on our hands.

And it's quite beautiful. I say that of course from a position of shelter, warmth, and not needing anything beyond my own house today. And for that I'm grateful.

I wasn't so totally grateful when the plow woke me up around 2:30 a.m. with its engine roaring, plow scraping on roadway, lights flashing through our meager curtains, and back-up alert beeping away as it backed at the nearby corner. And I wasn't so totally grateful when I stayed awake until close to 5 a.m. mulling over the events of the previous day and various other topics.

But images I have seen of bulldozers removing dead bodies from the streets of Port au Prince, Haiti have a way of putting things in perspective. I can even feel grateful for the loud plow in the wee hours, part of a well-oiled infrastructure that most Haitians have surely never experienced even in the best of times. I sent my best thoughts Haiti-ward when that came to my mind.

I rather enjoyed shoveling snow this morning before breakfast--not in any hurry, enjoying the relative lightness of even all that snow, just kind of getting into the rhythm of shoveling and shoving, remembering Haiti now and then, and savoring all the space that I had cleared before it seemed time to quit. I even cleared Digory a small loop of a path in the backyard, since seven inches is a few inches longer than the length of his legs.

A lovely way to start the day.

Philosopher Dog/Artist Dog

Digory has tramped out a perfect question mark in the snow. He went out around some object, or just because he felt like it, curved around, then stopped and retraced his steps. The only thing missing is the dot at the bottom. 

I wonder what his question is. Something tells me it's not about the existence of g.o.d. (which reminds me of the one about the dyslexic atheist, who didn't believe in the existence of dog, ha ha!). 

Or maybe he's not a philosopher dog at all, but an artist dog who likes making cool curves in the snow. He also likes rolling on his back in snow, and  also endlessly cooling and cleaning his muzzle in it, pushing himself along like a plow with his thick stumpy forepaws folded back at the "wrists" while his head makes small rocking movements to get the snow sensation on every last itchy inch. Dog bliss in winter.

Snow on Snow

"Snow had fallen snow on snow, snow on snow..." the words from the carol "In the bleak mid-winter" are kind of stuck in my head these days. Fifteen inches on top of four inches on top of an ice coating on top of a dusting, or something like that. That's where things stand in our neighborhood. Yesterday I had to laugh at the car I had left in our driveway half cleared; it looked as if it were sporting a high mohawk when I returned.

I hate to admit it, but some days I forget to admire the beauty of the snow, when figuring out what to do with it all moves up on the priority list. The birds, meanwhile, seem grateful for our feeders and our bird bath heater, and we are rewarded with a large flock of juncos, lots of gold finches in their duller winter feathers, and the many black, white and grey (in various patterns and combinations) birds: chickadees, titmice, nuthatches, woodpeckers, and such. Today three blue jays dwarfed them all. 

And I am grateful for the wood stove: there's nothing like that radiant warmth. Add a cup of tea, a favorite Christmas CD, and maybe even the length of the sofa...a perfect way to spend an hour.