Moonlight and Snowfall

It is 4:00 AM.  Despite my usual practice of turning on one downstairs light to help guide my way to the stairs which lead to our library, I left it off this morning.   Accordingly, the house is completely dark except for the light I am using to type.  For we have newly fallen snow for the first time this winter, and, despite the clouds, the ambient moonlight has caressed our fields sufficiently for them to glow ethereally.  Interior lights would only serve to disrupt my view of them.  I would rather grope about blindly  than lose sight of this magical combination of snow and moonlight.

To the east, our fields are covered in white – a thin blanket of white of no more than an inch or two in depth, a blanket which stops abruptly at the edge of the dense grove of alders lining the hillside above the meadow where deer will make nests in the forthcoming summer’s grass.  At the moment, the deer are probably taking their winter’s rest somewhere within the alders, safe among the leafless branches interwoven thickly about them.  The alder grove is small, wild, dense and unmaintained, allowed to grow at will to prevent erosion and hold the hillside intact.  Its interior is dark even in summer daylight, and tonight it has swallowed the moonlight whole to become more an impression than a reality.

To the north, below me at the bottom of the hillside where the alders grow, two bright yellow spotlights shine atop the posterns supporting my neighbor’s gate.  They imply a welcoming which would likely prove ephemeral were I to try to take advantage of it at this time of morning.  They are pinpricks in the dark: incandescent flames highlighting a small  portion of the deckled edges of the surrounding snow-covered fields; lonely sparks against a vast, virgin whiteness which awaits the inevitable scribblings of day; mere screams in the dark, violent in aspect yet insufficient of enough intensity to reveal the tracks of foraging coyotes and other nocturnal predators which most certainly have already been written there – there in the snow.

To the west, another neighbor’s horse barn leaks a fuzzy penumbra of light upon the newly fallen snow, as if the focal point in a landscape by Claude Monet.  No coyotes will have ventured near, for this is a working barn on a working farm.  But for all of the comfort, for all of the effort, implied by the very fact of this barn, it seems impotent within its snowy setting, powerless to resist further advances to be made by the snow were it to give us more than the fluttering kiss on the cheek it has graced us with this morning.

But the power is on and I am safe within, safe from the snow and from all of its suggestions of storm and cold, safe from all of its implications of withheld ferocity, safe within its sheltering magic.  For our home, too, undoubtedly appears lonely here within its fields.  For such is the singular power of each first snowfall of the season, a power at its peak when its snow is freshly fallen and virginal: the power to isolate each living thing within a chrysalis of its own needs and desires; the power to keep each of us warm within a swaddling blanket woven from skeins of unutterable magical charms and of the dream-like prospects of that which is yet to be written.

About Gavin Stevens

Humptulips County is the wholly fictional on-line residence of Stephen Ellis, a would-be writer, an avid fan of William Faulkner and his Yoknapatawpha County, and a retired lawyer.
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