It's Here!

We woke up Monday morning, November 10th---to this. Three inches of the heavy, wet quick-melting kind, but it's also the accumulates-on-every-branch kind. It's the very first of the season. I stuck my camera out the door as soon as I thought it was light enough, about 7:15. Those are not white spots on the lens--it was coming down like hail at that moment!

I always forget how beautiful these first snows are. Here's Mary Oliver's take on them.

FIRST SNOW
by Mary Oliver

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain-not a single
answer has been found-
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.