Sunday night, after the Nine Lessons and Carols, sung/read so well at St. Martin’s, I huddled in my warm kitchen in the back of my flat, hiding from the draft crashing through my front windows. At bedtime I braved the front room and found it glowing. Not a torch or someone’s errant headlights shining just outside, but snow. SNOW! My bedroom shone. The whole street shone.
If you have to drive in it or shovel it, if you slip while walking, or you live in the Shetlands, you might think differently, but to one safely inside, looking out, what a glory. To the college kids at the end of my street who scrambled outside to make snowmen and toss snowballs, a frolicking joy. To the couple kicking through the fresh snow, romantic, I’ll bet.
To me it felt soothing, quieting. Like many people, I’ve been towing a bag of 2022 griefs. My best attempts to run away from haven’t reduced the drag. Advent and Christmas on the horizon are piling on more weight. But that snow, its unexpectedness, it’s enthusiasm, its startling beauty, cheered me, indeed consoled me and remind me of Anne Sexton’s poem, “Snow.”
Snow,
blessed snow,
comes out of the sky
like bleached flies.
The ground is no longer naked.
The ground has on its clothes.
The trees poke out of sheets
and each branch wears the sock of God.
There is hope.
There is hope everywhere. I bite it.
Someone once said:
Don’t bite till you know
if it’s bread or stone. What I bite is all bread, rising, yeasty as a cloud.
There is hope.
There is hope everywhere. Today God gives milk
and I have the pail.
From The Awful Rowing Toward God (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975)
Annette Atkins
