It’s been a dark November. Once the brilliant October foliage is gone, we’re left with stark tree limbs against a grey sky. On rainy days, I drive to campus on dark roads, through grey puddles, past ground covered with dead brown leaves.
“Is it always this dreary here?” asked one of my students one morning. She’s from the west coast, and the cold, dark days were getting to her already.
“Colder is better,” Flannel Shirt assured her. “You’ll like winter here.”
“Snow will make everything better,” said another student.
I thought, as I looked out the window this morning, that my students were right. The snow spread across the lawn changed the soft colours of morning. Instead of staying lazily in bed, as I had planned, I couldn’t resist putting on my winter coat and boots, and taking a walk in the woods behind my house.
The cold woke me up as I breathed it in. I didn’t do much more than meander, stepping into puddles to break thin layers of ice, stopping to take photos, and tramping along trails that wind through old scotch pine. As the sun came up, the blue light caught the snow on the branches. Yesterday's raindrops had turned to crystals of ice. I didn’t walk long, but even that short time out in the cold woke me up, sent blood rushing through my veins. And the warm house, when I returned, seemed cosy.
2 comments:
Wow. Snow already. It is colder here than it was yesterday, so I guess we are having the much-milder version of your weather change. But no snow here.
That's exactly how it is here. The trees are bare, wet dead black leaves on the ground, my dirt driveway a river of mud and ick. I'm still waiting for that first dusting of snow, though, to make everything better. We had teeny tiny flurries this morning but nothing stuck.
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