A Dangerous, Yet Twinkling Affirmation

Make no mistake, the wind made it dangerous. With single-digit temperatures and 50-mile-per-hour winds beating those down into the sub-zero range while sending the 15-inches of snow airborne, the day was unarguably treacherous. The air in front of your eyes was almost as white as the ground beneath your feet. I haven’t been in many blizzards since living in Iowa, but this storm surely qualified. Even Barrington, who usually loves cold temperatures and dolphining his way across snow covered lawns, was reticent to go out. We left the house only once and even then merely to walk him a bit up the cul-de-sac. Layered and bundled unrecognizably beneath polypropylene and cotton and goose-down, booted and hooded and gloved, we ventured out mid-afternoon for what turned out to be a very short expedition. Neither we nor Barrington found the effort sustainable. We retreated back indoors to the sofa in front of the fire. We weren’t alone. No newspaper was delivered, nor any mail despite the historic promise that "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds." No one could blame them – nor were they alone. The roads were utterly abandoned as even the most intrepid sought refuge indoors. Make no mistake, then, the wind made it dangerous and treacherous.

But the winds also made it beautiful. The sidewalk leading to our front door looked, for all the world, like an albino Arizona – gentle layers of wind-swept desert, albeit snow instead of sand. All that was missing was a white saguaro cactus for accent. By contrast, outside our dining room window in the courtyard between townhomes, the snow was whipped up into shoulder high peaks of firm meringue. Somehow, and in apparent disregard for the laws of physics, snow accumulated atop the deck railing despite the wind, sliced into oversized muffins by the warmth of the rope lights wrapped around the wood.

And the trees. We thought all day of December in Vermont. How can evergreen boughs support such loads? How is it possible, as was true of the small potted tree on the sidewalk, for snow to completely encase the branches to the extent that branches are no longer in evidence, leaving only a general pyramidal shape perched on a pot? And how is it possible that, despite the frosty and complete coverage; despite the thick and obscuring veil, when evening came and the timer switched on, the lights on those trees still twinkled...

...festively...

...brightly...

...defiantly...

...valiantly?

Perhaps it was simply to confirm to us who had huddled inside that despite the treacherous wind, despite the bitter cold, despite the blanketing snow, “the light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”