25 October 2010
Feel free to blame me. I had half wondered, Saturday night, if perhaps the white stuff would show up Sunday morning; I had picked a hymn for the service that was all about the changing of seasons and the coming of winter. And sure enough, when I pulled back the curtain yesterday as I got out of bed, there it all was.
I'm sure many spent the day complaining. It wasn't just the snow; it was cold, cloudy, generally a grey and almost oppressive kind of day. I went to church and played the service (and did my bumbling best to handle a technical issue in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer - anyone know how to fix a Roland KR-177?), then went home and had a simple lunch. We all went to a friend's place to pick up some photo equipment. He lives on the other side of town, and the long drive was notably, and comfortably, quiet. It was an easy sort of day, the kind where you don't get ambitious. Where you let the house or the blanket or even the car wrap you up with heat and stare outside.
My wife has, in the past, commented on the annoying obligation of good weather, the kind that makes you feel like you can't possibly waste such a beautiful day, and makes you feel compelled to do the things that only that kind of weather permits, whether you actually feel like it or not. This was not one of those days. This was a day blissfully free from suggestion.
Except, perhaps, the hint it gave of things to come. The quiet has arrived, and the cold with it. Soon will come the next beat in the rhythm of the year: Hallowe'en, and All Saints' Day, and then Advent, and the reverent joy it heralds.
It is the change, though, that moves me most. Every season, we become familiar, and the wonder is lost. In spring, we look around and marvel at the new life everywhere, the beauty of green grass and flowers and birds. By the end of summer, these things have become mundane. And now, the snow comes, new and fresh in its own right even if I have seen thirty-some winters. Creation becomes new again.
All beautiful, the march of days as seasons come and go.
The hand that shaped the rose hath wrought the crystal of the snow...
Complain if you want. But all the better if you don't want to.