The snow began as I stood on my front porch, rearranging my hat and gloves in preparation for my morning walk down to the river. I walked down along the ponds, where yesterday we fed stale bread to hordes of ducks. This morning the ponds were deserted. Only the waterfalls broke the silence. When I got to the big fishing pond, the ice was covered with a thin, white layer of snow. When I got to the river, hundreds of geese could be seen taking off and landing and flying over head in ever-changing formations.

When I lived and worked in high rises downtown, it always seemd that snow came worrying up from the ground, the residue of the anxious chaos of the city. Here in the relative wilderness, the snow clearly falls from the sky, although this morning a stiff, honest breeze was pushing the snow toward the ground at an angle that was only a slight degree below horizontal.

We talk a lot about snow in the harriet household these days. The trend probably began with the onset of Christmas songs and stories. AJ�s books are full of it. Mostly they are of the Dr. Seuss variety, rhyming �snow� with �know,� �go,� �show� and �blow.� But one includes an excerpt from a poem entitled �Revival� by Native American poet Steve Crow (I know nothing of him except that this poem was included in NYC�s Poetry in Motion project several years ago):

Snow is a mind

falling, a continuous breath

of climbs, loops, spirals,

dips into the earth

like white fireflies

wanting to land, finding

a wind between houses,

diving like moths

into their own light

so that one wonders

if snow is a wing�s

long memory across winter.

My husband can�t stand this poem. He abhors its vagueries of language and resents what he sees as the haphazard line breaks. I feel like it describes the falling snow perfectly and that the line breaks articulate the nervous continuity of a snowstorm. Perhaps it�s because I�m more sound oriented than he.

I am off to strap on some skis and pay another visit to the river. One of my favorite things about where we live is that I can put on my skis in my front yard and go for miles. I leave you with the view from my bedroom window about an hour ago, courtesy of my new digital camera.

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