My husband loves snow globes – the fantasy of them with their tiny streets and perfect streetlights, miniature doors and perfect stories . . . all dancing with shiny light.
The pasture this morning.
Today, we are living in a snow globe. All of God’s Whisper Farm is coated in at least a foot of snow and the glitter is still falling from the sky.
The quiet – this may be the only time I call forth James Joyce with pleasure. And I feel a little like Laura Ingalls Wilder – the snow deluding me about my isolation.
I think I’m craving a little isolation.
I’m eager to walk into it and hear the way the air moves softly over the powder. I want to press my foot down and capture the crunch in my skeleton, the hard contrast to the way these tiny flakes dance in the sky.
I want to pull back and leave things . . . unliked, undone. Just for today, when the cotton of the world fills my ears.
The space of this storm gives me breath, forces me back away from the too much of my daily life.
I sit in this quiet with the wind my caress, and I see how the huge tree in the pasture looks like a cave – in spin images of Terebithia and forts, cave escapes, and princesses fully mighty. The starkness of the trees – charcoal on white – takes me Narnia and a castle of stone.
I imagine what Primus did on this day 200 years ago, about how he directed the other enslaved people at Bremo. I wonder if they got a snow day. I tell myself a tale – a magical one based only in wish – that they did and see fireplaces warm and stories slung like hammocks as the snow settled against the shuttered window sills.
This is the landscape of story.
The place I needed to come to me today. Even as I sit still.
What stories come to mind for you on snowy days?