Imbolc Valentine Moon
Daytime silence. The snow is higher around our house, in our orchard and vegetable 
garden than I can ever remember it. The garden shed, the honey house, the grandkids playhouse have foot-thick contoured roofs, snow conforming to their shape. In the orchard the currants are visible only at the tips and snow climbs the trunks of the cherry, the plum, the apple and pear trees. The fruit tree limbs dangle heavily, weighted down by snow clinging to them. Cedars, spruce and Norway pines all droop, heavy with captured snow. This kind of snow can injury trees, split limbs, even kill younger or more fragile trees.
The result is a quality of quiet I associate only with late night. A muffled experience with no mufflers, the kind of quiet where the sounds of your mind and your ear try to compensate with small murmurings, chirpings, light buzzing. Like the house has been wrapped in cotton.
It leaves me in a pleasant torpor, a vague holiday or weekend feeling on a Friday afternoon, wanting hot chocolate and a log fire. Some jazz, a good book. Mostly it feels like night, as if candles would be good, too, except the windows are ablaze with albedo returned sunlight off the new snowcover.
