Stunning Beauty, Savage Cruelty

Winter is a hard season for me. I do not like cold, and I have to make myself leave the house. I have to wear more clothes outdoors and in. Outside can look so very bleak.

Yet the landscape after a winter storm can be awesomely incredible in its evidence of nature’s strength and ultimate power. Unusual sights emerge like the sun shining through pristine white clouds and bright blue skies while ahead lays a gray sky thick with snow. Trees laden with snow and roads lined by ever-growing piles of the snowtruck’s deposits add to the much changed everyday sights. White fields and dark, heavy skies give a reversal of expected outdoors visual weights and I feel like Henny-Penny screaming, ‘The sky is falling, they sky is falling.” The dark, wet bark contrasts starkly with the snow etching each branch, bringing a visual acuity unseen in any other season. When the sun touches weeping willows the branches glow with gold. The burnished russet of last summer’s oak leaves offers a subtle but vivid split compliment to the purple shadowed snow and the deep green of adjacent pines. It is different, strange, gorgeous, overlooked spectacle from the warm landscapes of summer.

Snow covered apples

So too is the awesome effort needed to drive through a storm when caught—devastatingly hideous, scary. A forty-five minute trip can become ninety minutes or more of a dangerous, nerve-racking trek demanding intense attention: Is the dark patch in the road pavement or ice? How far ahead is the car hidden by the billowing snow cast upward by its wheels? Can I pass this car going twenty-five miles per hour on an apparently safe road, or is there an obstacle ahead? If I pull off on the shoulder, will my tires have traction to take off again? Oh no, someone’s slid off the road!

This past month has shown this effect throughout the Northern Hemisphere and the coming week looks like a replay. Is it an effect of Global Warming, or a global warning? Today’s fierce winds and ice-glazed roads have closed most schools in Northern Michigan. The temperatures are horrendous, promising frostbite to those who go out unprotected. Even my cats do not want to go out. If their desire overwhelms their prudence, they are soon back at the door—literally on it, pounding paws and shouting, “See me? see me! I want in!”