You’d think, looking out across the vast expanse of snowy
meadow that snow would be the great concealer, covering every sin of autumn.
You would be wrong. Snow is, instead the great revealer, carrying on its
surface the calligraphy of bird feet, the black dot trail of infinitesimal seed
dispersal, the tracks of leaf travel refrozen in small puddles of melt. On its
surface are scrawled the death stories of bloom and blossom, the life stories
of mole and mouse, the travel journals of fox and coyote.
Snow reveals man’s impatience with weather where it is
heaped, gravel-stained, along the roadsides and pushed impatiently back against
the banks of pond ice. It recounts, in rounded belly and stony eyes, the story
of a child at play and bears traces of snowshoe and ski with grace.
Nothing under the snow is unknown, only seen in another
form. Boulders sleep under blankets, bushes huddle in imitation of sheet-draped
parlor furniture, fence posts and tree branches become confections, frosted and
glittering. You could speak of snow as the great concealer but you would be
wrong. It merely puts the familiar in an unfamiliar light and reveals the
minutiae of the normally unobserved.
