Fleeting Impressions

Our boots sink deeply into the vast luxury of
fresh-fallen snow. The wide, blue sky guarantees
an icy atmosphere below, for the winter sun
only pretends in its radiant conceit, to warm
all it benevolently surveys. At other seasons
that flaming disk becomes a fiery oven;
in winter a wanly insouciant pretender.

It is the ascendant wind that now occupies
the regal weather throne, tormenting the
hapless with its icy, probing fingers, digging
deeply, diligently into protective feathers, fur
and impotent integuments. The enveloping cold
of winter, conspiring with shortened daylight
hours, burden nature's creatures with
long, dark and chill months best slept away.

But there is also transcendent loveliness in
the white veil cast bewitchingly over all that
is open to the heavens. Our eyes linger,
transfixed upon that vision. Snow clusters
cling plumply to branches, cushion the
outspread boughs of evergreens, softly
outlining contours and depressions, mounding
the landscape in clouds of white crystals.

The wind that leaves us breathless in its chill
embrace lifts long evanescent skeins of flakes -
like a myriad of stars in the Milky Way - from
laden trees, forming a waterfall of glittering
beauty before our eyes. Where seconds before
tracks we have left in the snow joined those of
woodland creatures, suddenly the wind's
scattering eliminates all, leaving a pristine
impression of a smoothly featureless white.