There’s a kind of hush all over the world
posted in Alaska, Weather |
It snowed today.
Oh, we’ve already had “snow”, some quick flurries of big, fat flakes drifting down, but today was a real snow.
In the dim early morning light, the dotter and I went out to check the chickens. It was foggy–or so I thought–hazy, gray draping the trees, the neighboring houses. But as we were traipsing across the back yard to the coops, the dotter claimed it was snow. I scoffed, and then heard–oh so faintly–tiny patters of microscopic snow flakes spitting onto the grass, onto my jacket. Still, it was nothing like the four inches we had been promised, so I shrugged it off, and we went back inside.
Half an hour later, as we headed off to the dotter’s school bus stop, it was truly snowing. The dotter happily trailed a bamboo twig from the porch behind her as we walked, leaving a line of boot prints and a black skein where the bamboo touched the ground. We stopped at the mailbox and pulled out a small pile of mail (including–woot!–an envelope of hollyhock seeds from Kate at High Altitude Gardening, woohoo!), I tucked it into my arms, and we crossed the street to wait on the corner.
Almost immediately, the nooks and crannies in my elbow, and the layers of the small pile of mail, began being loaded with lacy, puffy flakes. Flakes gathered on the dotter’s backpack, on my arms, on my hat. The dotter, delighted, used a finger to collect snow and hold it to her mouth; I joined her by scraping small mounds onto my own fingers and feeding them to her.
When I returned to the house, it was still snowing.
An hour later, I stopped out onto the kitchen porch to take a break, and was struck by the silence.
We live in suburbia. The national media calls it a “rural town”, but to those of us who live here, it’s suburbs. Oh, we’re not right outside Big City, but we are a “bedroom community” for Big City, and it’s built like all those fancy-schmancy new suburbs in California or Arizona or Texas…it’s just older. Lots of one-acre lots, lots of strip malls, no real town center (unlike Small Town, in between Suburban Alaska and Big City, which does have a town center). Anyway, there’s almost always a hum of traffic as a background noise; not a lot, mind you, but it’s there.
This morning, though, it was utterly silent. Muffled. Quiet. You could hear the snow falling on the leaves still remaining on the trees, pattering them gently, but the acoustics of the snow seemed to have put a lid on the traffic sounds.
It was hushed. And beautiful.
Of course, even though it’s Alaska, we haven’t hit “winter” yet, so the temperature hovered around freezing all day and the snow, while accumulating, was also melting. When the snowfall ended, the melting took over. What was probably six inches of snow quickly melted down to three.
When the dotter returned home, I postponed doing homework for a chance to get out into the back yard to throw snowballs at each other and built a small snowman.
The first snowfall of winter is always magical.
