Color comes first to the sky – a pewter cast that engulfs all other light and gives the air a substance so real that it might be grasped, chewed, and swallowed as if a breakfast of oatmeal.  Its veil appears first on the eastern horizon, but quickly spreads in forewarning across the sky until every living thing, every comprehensible shape abiding in the landscape, becomes cast and silvered into statuary. Everything assumes an ethereal glow as this light casts only the true image of  who or what it is, sculpting its bare essence into a stillborn profile. Only the birds retain their outward identity, streaks of color shot through the pewtered gloom as if still brightly colored ribbons woven into an otherwise faded rag rug handmade by an ancient relative, continuing to forage as if nothing – nothing at all, nothing of such grand immensity – had come to alter their world.
Then, a single flake falls, then two, then multiplicities. The flakes are small and round at first – pellets of white falling straight down, advance troops for their larger comrades who will follow. They are much too small to be able to drench the world in white, and, at first, the earth seems amused by them. It seems to toy with this early snowfall, its outcroppings playing peekaboo with one another as if  the pellets were toddlers needing to be entertained.  For, in its immensity, the earth suffers from an arrogance which refuses to admit that it might be smothered. In truth, its arrogance is warranted, for at their deepest, snowdrifts can only smooth its profile, hide its insecurities and faults, and clothe, but not cloak, its basic shape.
Soon, larger flakes begin to fall, summoned in response to the drowsiness settling over the earth. They drift downward in soothing waves of ever-increasing density, until finally the air is a blanket of white and even the birds are driven to cover – driven to the depths of the pines, the yews, the junipers, the dense, winter-weary, tatterdemalion thickets of this-and-that and whatever-you-may-call-it that cover the hillside behind the house where they will wait out the snowfall until it becomes time to reclaim their solitary vibrancy and emerge from their miniaturized sanctuaries into a frozen cathedral of silence where they will be anointed as its only liquid grace notes.
And so, for now, the earth holds its breath and waits in silence, one foot slightly forward in anticipation, but otherwise frozen into immobility. The earth will hold this pose for as long as it takes in an epitome of patience, not tiring until the snow’s fabric begins to fray, not moving forward until snowdrifts only cover the deepest or most remote places – those places into which the sunlight rarely intrudes, if ever.
Proof of winter has finally come to Humptulips County.
