Crench, Crunch, Crinch

That is what it sounds like to walk outside right now... and I am trying to be sentimental about that sound. Believe me.

Sweeping off my car for the second day in a row, and the wind kept making a blinding cloud around me with each stroke... eyes were stinging, hands were burning, progress was slow.

I read in Genesis last week (it's true, beginning of the year means starting at the beginning of the Bible... again... in the hopes of making it through the whole thing... this time...) that the seasons were a part of God's original design for this earth. But surely not this one. Surely winter is a product of the fall.

As I swept and scraped... I tried to remember something. When I was a kid, snow was so utterly transformative of the world around me, it seemed a waste to not spend every second outside in it. I felt burdened to just walk around and... see. To let the cold drive you in, even if you intended to come back out tomorrow, would be to risk losing the best viewing... because tomorrow, the snow might be blown out of the trees and have dog foot prints and sledding tracks all over it. The first few hours post-snow storm were urgent. After a good snowfall, the trees that had seemed gnarled and desperate were suddenly cloaked like lords. The dead, brown grass was replaced by drifts... how do you even try to describe such graceful lines? How does that even happen? Blustery wind... tiny bits of frozen water... complete art. In the woods, immediately after a snow, everything seemed loftier, and quieter. Winter is always quiet in the woods, but after a snow it was different because it wasn't the quiet of death... it seemed like the quiet of sacredness. Everything was hushed, because it was aware of the beauty it was wearing. (When we dress up, we take ourselves more seriously. I learned this in the woods.) I remember thinking... in the serious hush... in the towering spaciousness... with every last inch draped in art... "this must be what it is like in a cathedral."

I've been inside some cathedrals... and really, they didn't compare at all to the woods... right after a snow... when I was younger.

That is what I tried to remember... as I scraped the blinding piles off my car... in the midst of an old apartment complex that suddenly looks a little like an Alpine village... crinch, crunch, crench.

Maybe this season was a part of the time when things were "good."