At last! Snow! I was delighted to awaken yesterday morning to an inch of white covering everything in sight and more snow falling from a grey sky.

I bundled up and got outside as fast as I could. As I walked up our steep driveway to the dirt road running along the ridge, I noticed that most of the trees were wearing a thin line of snow, from the bottom of their trunks to the top.

I wondered why these ‘racing stripes’ weren’t wider. Why hadn’t the snow that blew toward the trees from the west stuck to their entire sides? Then I remembered my husband Andy reporting that the wind had blown so mightily during the night that the house shook around us.

“That’s it,” I thought. In pushing snow against the trees, the wind had been strong enough that only the snow hitting the middle of the trunks had been stopped. But snow scouring the trunks on either side of the snowy stripe had been forced around the trees, on again, more deeply into the forest.

When I reached the top of the ridge, I almost laughed. What a contrast between the trees on the east side of the road and those on the west side. All the trees on the east side sported a white vertical stripe, while the trees on the other side were just a bare, wintry grey. But the trees west of the road only appeared to lack a snowy stripe. I was seeing their east-facing sides, after all; it was on their reverse sides that their stripes of snow were hidden.

Walking along the road, I noticed how different types of trees wore the snow differently. The spruces, their branches encircled by hard, tightly-packed, stiff needles, were coated with long white fingers of snow.

But the white pines were a different story. Unlike the stolid spruces, these slight, supple pines offer little solid surface for snow to rest. Instead, the snow had found points here and there, where twig met needles, and clung there in tiny snowballs. Needles poked out from some of these little snow clumps, reminding me of the hairy moles on a witch’s chin.

A ways on, I noticed balls of white up in one of the bare oaks. There rested the crown of a Virginia pine, its small round cones capped in snow. The wind had torn the pine’s head from its body and flung it against the chestnut oak. And there it lay, askew but still aloft, supported in the oak tree’s strong limbs.

Wind and snow had labored together during the night. –April Moore

This entry was posted on Friday, January 16th, 2009 at 2:32 pm and is filed under Celebrating our beautiful Earth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.