"You wake up on a winter morning and pull up the shade, and what lay there the evening before is no longer there - the sodden grey yard, the dog droppings, the tire tracks in the frozen mud, the broken lawn chair you forgot to take in last fall. All this has disappeared overnight, and what you look out on is not the snow of Narnia but the snow of home, which is no less shimmering and white as it falls. The earth is covered with it, and it is falling still in silence so deep that you can hear its silence. It is snow to be shovelled, to make driving even worse than usual, snow to be joked about and cursed at, but unless the child in you is entirely dead, it is snow, too, that can make the heart beat faster when it catches you by surprise that way, before your defences are up. It is snow that can awaken memories of things more wonderful than anything you ever knew or dreamed." ~ Frederick Buechner
Snow has been late coming to Fat Hummingbird Farm this year. There was a skiff here and there during November and December and the faint unfulfilled promise of a white Christmas, but nothing that stayed around. We were told that last year's snow amount was unusual and we didn't find that that was particularly onerous. We certainly have not experienced the amounts that my sister-in-law out in the interior of British Columbia has had. Heavy snow of almost four feet and power gone for two days plus. Not here, not yet.
But yesterday, in early January, the first blizzard of the season. And more snow in the offing. Meteorologists may perceive snow to be a result of pressure systems and precipitation levels; physicists will recognize the subatomic particles that create snow; but anyone who views the world with a bit of a mystical eye will see snow differently. The mystical eye sees the energy that snow manifests, drawn from the cosmic; and how our minds, our psyche, and soul become illuminated.
The singular charm of viewing snow-draped fields and pastures, trees and outbuildings from each of the windows at Fat Hummingbird Farm is that each is distinctly different.
For instance, out my studio windows, the view is across the farmyard and up the side of the mountain. There the trees are thick in number and varied in species. The snow sits in the branches of each tree dependent on the individual structure of the tree. The snow on the spruce trees lays along the branch, as though they are offering outstretched arms laden with trays of frigid canapés to us. Inviting us to the party. The snow on the oak trees stays snugged in close to the trunk, as though they are holding white-swaddled babies, singing shushing lullabies.
The snow on the tiny tangled twigs of the various kinds of birches makes their appearance even more bouffant. They all look like a gaggle of elderly ladies that are sitting for tea after a day at the hairdressers. All of them with too-tight perms and their hair rinsed the same blue-white. All with the same hairstyle as the hairdresser was only recently graduated from beauty school and knows only one style for 'the mature woman'. The skeletal wild rose and grape vines hold drapes of snow that look for all the world like they are wearing venetian masks - drooping eyeholes and sinister smiles.
Out of our bedroom window, the view is a vast sweep across the valley. When snow-covered it looks like a vast piece of drawing paper. Charcoal hedges and scrub are scrummed in with dull chalk pastels. The bare, stark lines of leafless trees are marked in with the equally stark strokes of a black India ink pen. The snow squalls and drifting snow on the opposite mountain are textured and muted by rubbing charcoal in hard with a sweaty finger - and then erasing it, small bits of pilled paper creating texture. Nearer to the window our pasture denotes its previous life as an orchard, the humped rows delineated and accentuated by the piled snow. The ghosts of old apple trees skitter along the surface with the blowing winds.
Out the living room window that faces the hay field the snow piles around the feet of trees much larger than those in the woods. The snow tries to cling to the limbs and hanging branches of the willows but inevitably slumps to the ground. Depending on the direction of the wind when the snow fell, it will fill the coarse-grained and chapped bark of the beech and maple trees on that one side with snow. You can make out shapes of faces, and countries, and omen and auguries in the patterns of trunk and snow. The snow on the ground in this view is not smooth. It is tangled with the long leftover hay and grasses and thistles. The stream runs alongside this field. As the snow increases the stream decreases. It fills with snow and becomes less distinct. The water continues to run under the surface of the snow but when the snow is deep enough you would not know there is a stream there.
The view out of the kitchen window is, appropriately so, one of hunger. Here the bird feeders hang. Birds suspend from them, fly to and from them, hover around them - like a swarm of bees with no place to go. The starlings drop to the rain barrels below for the fallen seeds, brooming the snow from the top of the barrels with their wings, making them look like an ugly/pretty version of a street sweeper. The snow in this view looks like a quilt - the tracks of many different kinds of birds stitching back and forth and around and around like the stitching has been done by a mad, crazed quilter with crossed eyes.
There is rain predicted - and that will change the views. And snow again, and change again. The windows will reveal new shapes, new forms, new snow. That is, if you don't think like a meteorologist or a physicist, but like a mystic.
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