Samhain Winter Moon
A gentle new snow has fallen since I got up. It will freshen up the landscape, make it softer and whiter. The barriers between our home and the Arctic get taken down in the winter months. Arctic air masses plunge south, creating large swaths of blue on the weather maps. They chill us just as they do the polar bears and lynx and wolves of the far north.
We get our largest snow amounts though when Gulf Air, moist and warm, gets sucked up north where it meets these air masses. This union of north and south chills the rain, makes it into crystals and they tumble out of the clouds. A snow sociologist (yes, there is such a specialty.) says that one of winter’s special characteristics comes from snow erasing clear borders, blurring boundaries between fences and open pastures, between rooflines and the ground, between road and ditch, between yard and driveway and sidewalk.
A sense of newness comes over us as summer’s sharp lines grow curves and those good fences making good neighbors become lumps under drifts. The world made new as the snow falls and falls.
