Relative Something

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It was an otherwise innocuous passing flurry of barely 3 inches of fluffy light snow. Delicate flakes, each one unique, falling in a graceful dance with the air, moving in a randomly synchronized patterned performance. How many snowflakes could there be? They pile up. They land on every available surface, and swerve to reach places not so available.

Yesterday’s snowfall draped itself softly over the wind-hardened drifts in the driveway to complicate an already challenging chore. I had walked over those drifts the night before when I took the garbage bin down to the road. They were packed so dense that I could walk on them without breaking through. It’s like walking on water. It’s just snow, so logic has it that a boot would submerge, but not when it gets packed this tight. Across the top I strolled.

Delilah is finding the latest snow conditions to be confounding. Sometimes she stays above, and sometimes she breaks through. At the speed she is usually traversing, it causes her to do a face-plant into the deep. Then she has to swim a bit to reach a place where she can switch to her deer-like leaps to bounce through the deepest parts.

When the snow stopped falling yesterday, there was plowing and shoveling to be done, again. Those light, teeny flakes that fall from the sky change dramatically when they come to rest en masse. They foil the attempts of machines that try to move them, causing the wheels of the tractor to spin in place against the weight of the snow.

Walking our property has become unthinkable without snowshoes. If I had time to get down to the labyrinth, I would verify that it was entirely invisible at this point, buried beneath the biggest accumulation of the year last week that was followed by the gale force winds and then topped off with the several fluffy inches yesterday.

Snowflakes are beautiful and brutal. I think that’s what makes them great.

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