The snow is beautiful.

As mentioned in previous posts, I'm not a big fan of winter weather when driving, but I love waking up and seeing a fresh coat of snow over everything. It's a fresh start. Hard to imagine anything bad going on in houses that look so pristine and peaceful.

It was still snowing when I went to bed last night. It was really neat to be able to look out of my windows to see the snow falling in the squares of light that other people's windows were projecting out onto the snow. Like snow falling in front of a spotlight. It made everything all cozy.

This morning, I woke up with the bedroom brighter than normal. We don't have blinds in there yet (which results in a very interesting dilemma when you realize that you've forgotten to bring an important piece of clothing with you into the bathroom before you got undressed and showered) so it's always fairly bright in there, which helps me wake up. But this was fabulous! The reflection of the sun on the snow (it's called albedo-- see, I paid attention in meterology class) creates this marvelous white glow that beams back into the house, lighting everything up. Even on the sunniest of days in summer, the light in the house is not like this. I love it, this pale, white, glow that seems to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once. It's so cozy.

All the houses in my neighborhood are new, so there aren't a lot of trees or landscaping to get in the way of the snow. All you have are these pale houses (white, light yellow, light blue) blending into the drifts of snow on the ground, their darker roofs covered with snow, so it looks almost like the houses are a product of the snow. Like there's snow here year round and we have created houses to reflect that. Like we live on the ice planet Hoth, which weirdly enough, sounds like it should be a warm planet.

I came downstairs to make some breakfast and found that the snow had blown onto the windows, creating this very cool, hey-we're-snowbound kind of feel to the house. The house is an isolated warm sanctuary, further insulated by this blanket of snow, in this cold, Hoth-like world. The house behind me, a new one with no one living it yet, has this shiny metal pipe sticking off the roof, really bright in the morning sun. This morning it was releasing trails of heated air into the sky, just like a chimney puts out smoke. I'm guessing I have one of the shiny metal pipes on my roof too, something to do with the furnace probably. And I imagine that it's puffing away this morning, making the house look lived in and welcome-y. A sign that people live there and are cozy and warm inside.

Snow is isolating. It makes me feel like we're trapped on some kind of science station on a new planet, an ice planet, the way it wipes out or alters all the familiar sights you're used to seeing. It's both dangerous and beautiful as so many of the most interesting things in life are. It is not a kind and gentle beauty like flowers or new grass. It's beautiful in this cold, callous kind of way. Snow, after all, can kill you, even though it's just this little small thing. It will still be beautiful even if you kill yourself shoveling it or your car slides into a ditch on it. Yet, when we're safe and warm inside, it's all good.

*sigh* I love it when it snows. That's probably the big flaw in my plan to packing our house up and moving us to Hawaii. Not a lot of snow there. But then again, check in with me in a couple of months after we've shoveled out the driveway seventeen times and the roads are so bad that I'm already late for work the next day before I even make it home the previous night. A slight exaggeration...but not much of one, really.