First Snow

We had our first proper snow of the season last night - a very heavy, wet snow that did not so much fall as plummet. My family and I went to Mass in Carson City, and ended up driving back up the mountain in the storm, and a right challenge it was too, let me tell you. It was a very black night. The huge, feathery flakes, driving wildly into the windscreen, caught the light from the headlights, and scattered it into the storm. A flat, white wash of snow on the road obliterated the lanes. The concrete divide in the center of the highway, and the white line marking the shoulder of the road, disappeared into the into the vortex. It was as though the whole world had shrunk, and consisted of nothing more than my small car in all that fury of snow,. If anything were to materialise in that great nothingness, I would not have seen it until the last moment. Fortunately, I rather like driving in snow. I am good at it, and enjoy the occasional challenge. Still, I must admit that I should not like an experience like that too often.

It was a short-lived storm, for all its fury. We got a couple inches of snow out of it, enough to make the roads icy, and the world look like a half-finished sketch in watercolours, but it will no doubt be away before the day is out. I ran out first thing this morning to get a picture of snow on our birch tree, which is still dressed in all its golden splendor, while the aspens have been reduced to pale ghost-trees, all green-grey, their few remaining leaves the colour of winter sunshine. The picture does not do justice to the colours, of course - photographs almost never do - but it gives the idea.