Today the first snow fell, and as Priestley said, it is indeed an event. Beyond the beauty, beyond the calm it brings by dampening noise, and beyond the hints of a season to come, it also brings an undeniable link to the past–to the childhood, when it was a blessing rather than a curse (unless you had to walk ten miles to school through it!). In those delicate little flakes of snow is another world, and like changing worlds we go to sleep with one and awake to another blanketed in white. The transformation is befitting of nature, who is always changing and yet, unlike us, revolving around a point with unerring certitude. And it will still when we are all gone.

Take a moment and watch it all, or observe it gathered undisturbed on the porch. There is, to me, far more tranquility and hidden thought in the simple trappings of nature than in the greatest creations of humankind.