"In Wood and Water, Earth and Air, A Silence Is Everywhere."*

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself. ~Ruth Stout

I hate the cold. (A combined total of 11 years spent in the deserts of Las Vegas and Phoenix destroyed whatever tolerance living in south Georgia and Spangdahlem, Germany had managed to build up.)

But I love the season of winter.

Particularly when it brings snow.

We took a midnight walk through our apartment complex, across parking lots with patches of ice that nearly took our feet out from under us several times. I caught snowflakes on my tongue.


The lake is half-frozen over.

It's beautiful.

There's something so quiet, and soft, and reserved about winter nights like these.

The snow fall is slow and steady. The flakes, little more than whispers of ice.

And the ground glistens and sparkles. Like stars. Like moonlit mirrors.

Nights like these capture a little bit of that magic that seemed to abound when I was a kid.

The world under a layer of ice seems alien and exotic. And the question "what if?" that has run through my mind with fair consistency since I was little seems to be that much stronger.

What if those prints in the snow are from the hooves of a satyr? What if those long shadows under the frost laden branches are sylvan spirits come out for a breath of winter air? What if something's lurking beneath that ice on the lake?

The cold itself makes me pull inward, long for a cup of tea or coffee, the soft warmth of my bed, the pull of a good movie or book.

But the snow, the quiet hush of a world that seems to be holding it's breath beneath a white blanket, makes me want to pull out a notebook and see where my pen takes me.

(Title: From Loreena McKennitt's "Snow.")

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I'm hopping today.
(I'm kind of amazed I had an old post that would actually fit in this category.)