snow – Plain and Fancy

A long, wavelike ridge of snow . . . formed by the wind: Sastruga, a word of Russian origin.

A snowdrift is a beautiful thing if it doesn’t lie across the path you’ll have to shovel or block the road that leads to your destination.

Prehistoric Humps

Snow Drift, Google Images — Snowdrift, Google Images

James Thomson’s “Winter” from The Season portrays drifts as “one wild dazzling waste, that buries wide / The works of man.”

Snow So Pure

~ Percy Bysshe Shelley, # 497 Invocation

Snow So Fun

[to] mimic in slow structures, stone by stone / The frolic architecture of the snow. – from Emerson, The Snow-Storm

Snow-faced Mark in "igloo" 1961 — Snow-faced brother Mark Longenecker in “igloo” 1961

Snow Plow: Carving Out the Road Again

Ray Longenecker, my dad, plowing Anchor Road, 1961

A smooth white mound the brush pile showed, / A fenceless drift that once was road ~ from Whittier’s Snow Bound: A Winter Idyll

Snow in Childhood . . . Never Ends

Brother Mark with sled and Skippy in the snow 1961

William Matthews in “Spring Snow” depicts a place where “childhood doesn’t end / but accumulates” and memories . . . disperse “in flecks, like dust, like flour, like snow.”

Snow provokes responses that reach right back to childhood. – Andy Goldsworthy

Snow Quotes

Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow?” Job 38: 22a

* * *

New fallen snow is exquisite. But practical difficulties persist as snow lingers: messy cleanup, re-frozen slush, slick sidewalks.

Did you throw snowballs during recess at school? Help make an igloo? Snow memories welcome here.

Coming next: 5 Lessons Learned from a Birthday Cake

Every single memory of snow in my childhood is pleasant. Sparkling flakes in luminous free-fall as I look out the kitchen window. Snow festooning evergreen boughs. Then bundling up in snowsuits, knitted caps, mittens. Getting out the sleds.

After more than one snowstorm, Aunt Ruthie grabbed her movie camera and trained her sharp eye on some big, tall sledders who went coasting down the hill from our house to Grandma Longenecker’s.

Then she captured our anticipation of trumping through nearly hip-high snow and finally (my favorite) Mother pulling my sister Janice and I on the Flexible Flyer sled along Anchor Road.

Another parent and daughter are observing the snow in The First Snowfall by American poet James Russell Lowell, a poem I remember Mother reciting.

Mabel marvels at the beauty of the snow and inquires of its origin . . .

. . . but as the father’s replies to Mabel, he remembers the snow which hides the scar of another child’s burial plot.

Then Mabel feels her father’s gentle kiss, a kiss she will never know was intended for the daughter beyond his touch. The last stanza leaves Mabel in child-like wonder, her father in pensive grief.

This post began with snapshots of fun in the snow and ended with a reflection on loss. But snow can be the setting for other memorable events: a frolic with friends, a car accident, a marriage proposal (I’ll save that for another post!)

You probably have memories of snow, recent or long ago. Here’s your chance to share them.

Tag: snow

Sastruga, Snowy Winter Blankets

Snow Falling on Anchor Road

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