Repainting the landscape

Julia ♦ February 7, 2021 ♦ 4 Comments

Snow accents our neighbors’ beautifully hardy evergreens, January 2010.

“Nature has many scenes to exhibit, and constantly draws a curtain over this part or that. She is constantly repainting the landscape and all surfaces, dressing up some scene for our entertainment. Lately we had a leafy wilderness; now bare twigs begin to prevail, and soon she will surprise us with a mantle of snow. Some green she thinks so good for our eyes that, like blue, she never banishes it entirely from our eyes, but has created evergreens.” — Henry David Thoreau

As I write this (a little over two weeks before it is scheduled to be published) there is a pristine blanket of white outside, spreading over every unpaved bit of ground, unspoiled as yet by footsteps.  This recent snow was unusually powdery, blowing about and leaving drifts against the windowsills, a rare sight here in Virginia.

Though the snow is dazzlingly bright in the sun, I am glad for the remnant of blue and green in the landscape; a sky that looks remarkably like the ones we see in springtime, and evergreens that seem bundled up with their thick foliage, unharmed by the single-digit temperatures of the past 24 hours.

I hope we all hold within our imaginations the blues and greens of warmer days, a sort of internal immunization against the gloom that can overtake us in winter.  How delightful to have the beauty of snow along with just a hint of the colors that will delight us in the springtime days that lie ahead!

One year ago today

Impressions of beauty and delight

This post was first published seven years ago today. The original post, comments and photo are linked, along with two other related posts, below. These links to related posts, and their thumbnail photos, do not appear in the blog feed; they are only visible when viewing the individual posts by clicking on each one. I have no idea why, nor do I know how they choose the related posts. That’s just the way WordPress does things.