Winter Magic

Sometimes the universe gives you gifts.  Mine came in the form of a magical winter night.  For three days I was snowbound in our third-floor condominium.  My husband was away at a conference in the States , so I was left to watch the snowfall with my three mesmerized cats.  These were Arizona girls and not at all familiar with the white sparkling powder covering their world.  Accustomed to daily sunbaths on the balcony, they ventured confidently outside one of these snowy mornings, stepping gingerly along the small swath of porch least drifted upon.  Cricket shook one paw at a time, frantically trying to somehow remove the cold.  All three were wide-eyed and puzzled.   They didn't last long.  The windchill was -25 Fahrenheit.

I didn't mind being snowed in.  The pantry was full, the heater pleasantly ticked away, and the house was lit with that clean white light that only comes from sunbeams bouncing on snow.  The only sounds not dampened by the the weather were the geese,  arranging themselves in floating V's overhead.

The magic came on the first night of the storm.  The streets and sidewalks, having been warmed by the recent Chinook winds, resisted the snowfall, and for a few hours on that first evening, when the full moon peeked above the horizon, I had a clear path before me into the glowing white landscape.  Tucked at the base of the coulees at the edge of the Oldman River are the rolling grassy knolls of the golf course on which we live.  In winter, golf carts are locked away and the land becomes uninterrupted slopes of white, dotted here and there by simple tracks of deer and jackrabbit.

It was unfailingly beautiful, but on this night, as I mentioned, it was magic.  Walking along the river, stark bare trees silhouetted by the moonlight, I had the strangest sense of having slipped into an Ansel Adams photograph--black and white, silent and haunting, stillness captured. Hundreds of geese cawed as they bobbed amongst the floating ice in the river.  A gaggle, they'd be called, but I'd prefer words used for other flocks--"a bellowing", perhaps, for the sounds or a "drift" for their bobbing bodies.  Even more fitting, "a convocation" or "exaltation" for the prayer and joy they invited in me.

This was a short-lived span of peaceful days amongst months of long and hard hours of work and bouts of loneliness.  I hold them like smooth stones in my hand, treasures to comfort me on the darkest days.  I do not see ravens here, nor swans, but on the afternoons when the sky darkens early and I trudge up the stairs after another long day, I think of the words used for flocks of these birds, an "unkindness,"  a "lamentation," and I imagine the sky swirling with them, my loneliness and heavy thoughts manifesting themselves in avian forms above me.