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Only 54 days until
spring!
I don’t know
why it is, but whenever the first snow of the season arrives, I have
this terrible urge to bundle up and go outside for a walk. I don’t
understand it, since I don’t get this urge in the spring, when it’s
warm, or in the fall, when the leaves are so colorful. No, I get the
urge to bundle up and go outside when the weather gets nasty.
I think it
comes from those snow days when I was a school child. You know, back
before computers and video games and 150 channels on television. Back in
the days when, if you were home from school, your parents sent you
outside.
It has to be
from that, since I feel like a kid again as I put on the long johns,
layers of clothes, double socks, snow boots, scarf, hat, mittens and
winter coat.
This year’s
walk came on Sunday, and I took Daisy, our beagle puppy, with me. Daisy
had never seen snow before. She went crazy, running hither and yon to
take bites of the white stuff, as if it would taste different here than
it did over there.
The crocus
and daffodil that had sprouted in the unseasonably warm, wet weather of
previous weeks now look appropriate surrounded by snow, and look as if
they will still fare well. The buds on my lilac do not look so good.
Daisy and I walked
around the white (but not frozen) lake, and breathed in the air that
felt cleaner, fresher than normal. In my snow pants, I plopped down onto
the ground, knowing I was waterproof, and listened to the world. The
world under a blanket of snow seems calmer, quieter, more serene. Daisy,
however, could hear the small critters beneath the snow, and she pounced
and prodded the snow with her nose, trying to find the ground moles and
field mice that were scuttering beneath their white cover.
Like the
sight of the ocean, or the view from a mountain, a silent squat in the
fresh snow can ease the mind. In his essays on Walden,
Henry
David
Thoreau
said, “Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown
off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the
rails.”
Sitting in the snow, you
come to understand what he is saying --everyone needs a snow day.
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