Snowfall

It snowed today.

It’s early for snow, even in Wisconsin, though not eerily so.  We’ve had snow on Halloween, after all.  It doesn’t usually snow on November 9, but then again it can.  It’s Wisconsin.

When I woke up this morning the grassy places were covered in white and big soft snowflakes were still drifting slowly toward the ground.  They didn’t do that for very long.  It must have been the tail end of whatever storm had gone through in the night, the last bit to be sent earthward.  The roads were clear and most of the wooden areas like our back porch were bare, but there was a lot of snow cover this morning on the way to work.

I like the snow.  I like how it covers things up and makes them silent, makes them simple.  For a brief moment the world is a more beautiful place.

It can be that way, you know, if we let it.

We haven’t had a lot of letting it recently.  These are hard times even in the midst of plenty, which somehow makes them just that much harder.

We are led by an idiot and his followers, burrowing like termites into the joists of the republic.  We face a future of wildly shifting climate that nearly half of the country refuses to recognize.  Economic inequality is now at levels last seen in 1929, and that didn't end well last time.  The American war on anyone not white, male, wealthy, and evangelical continues with a vengeance.  Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson – by all accounts a perfectly decent human being – nevertheless continues to make movies. 

But for a little while the snow covers it all and reminds us that there is more to this world than those things.

I like the snow.

It’s nice to have that here, now.