Winter has never been my favorite season, but I can appreciate its own particular brand of beauty, especially when it comes to snow. Is there anything quite like it? One moment it floats through the air in big fluffy flakes, surrounding you in a cloud of dandelion seeds, and the next it’s falling fast and furious, narrowing your world to a whiteout. 

It descends from the sky in so many forms and speeds, it almost seems facetious to classify it with such a small, innocuous word as snow. The flakes float down from the heavens, meandering through the air as if in no hurry to leave the breezes and byways that buffet it to touch the cold, unyielding earth. Or shower to the ground, pulling a lace curtain across the world like the delicate fabric that billowed across your grandmother’s window on a warm spring afternoon. It covers the world in crystalline icing, smoothing out the peaks and lumps to form a frothy carpet of white. Sometimes it pours from the clouds in such a fury, lashing out at the world below like a temperamental teenager denied her whim, who then apologizes at dawn by presenting us with a wintry paradise glittering in the rising sun. 

The anger of a blizzard terrifies us, presenting a real danger to our lives, while the tame remnants of the storm offer themselves up for our amusement: snowmen, snowball fights, sledding. In our modern age of trains, plains, and automobiles, it melts all too quickly into slushy piles stained black with exhaust, but the sight of an unblemished countryside blanketed in white still inspires awe in our soul. The silence of a snowfall in the country on a winter evening is one of the unspoken wonders of the world—when the sky is still bright from the reflected snow and each flake can be heard striking the earth like a whisper across your skin. It is peaceful and solitary and still, as if the earth is taking deep, calming breaths in time with the beat of your heart.