Snow

It was snowing again so I wore my tartan scarf round my head. I imagined I was a Russian peasant child trudging my walk to school, and I wondered what it must be like to find snow ordinary and mundane. It is interesting how snow falls fast, and makes the air full of movement, yet gives everything a sense of stillness and quietness. Perhaps it is because, unlike rain, it floats, and you can fix your eyes on one flake and watch it fall... but then when you look through the falling snow it seems to descend in sheets, each layer falling in a diagonal, cutting across the layers around it. Perhaps its magic comes not only from how it drifts through the sky (seeming to come from nowhere, as the sky itself is snowy-grey when it falls) but its intense whiteness, that isn't really like anything earthy or natural. At this moment I can look out of my window and the reflecting white of the snow is as dense and solid as the dark overbearing shapes of the evergreen opposite. The other trees in the gardens are also black at this time of day, with their branches creating a mesh that seems so at odds with the flat white ground. It isn't white like the white that signals absence of substance, but it has a presence and solidity of its own, that is different from the tangible dark green circles underneath the trees where it has not fallen.