Filling the dark trees

Julia ♦ March 9, 2022 ♦ 2 Comments

The woods behind our home were transformed by the snow. March 5, 2015

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.    ― Mary Oliver

I saw more snow last week than I’ve seen any week since we lived in Ohio, and maybe more than any week ever in March.  It was hard to think of anything else.  Something about being stuck at home inspired me to relax more than usual and give myself time off from everything except enjoying the lazy mornings and disrupted schedule.

I hope you are, like me, still awed by its beauty no matter how ready we all are for spring.  I took these photos on a late afternoon walk after watching the snow fall all day.  I only walked around our building, but the same scenes I see every day were transformed into lacy enchantment.

Oliver is right about the prettiness, but snow’s reason for being goes far beyond that, of course. Since Eric’s comments a couple of years back about the benefits of snow for the growth of plants, I’ve been experimenting with bringing snow inside to water my indoor plants, some of which I dug up to keep inside for the winter.  Maybe it’s my imagination, but I was impressed by how the plants responded.

I decided to upcycle my empty club soda bottle to make this handy snow catcher to water my plants.  All I had to do was open my door and scoop up some snow — no gloves or shoes or coats needed! — and then it would melt surprisingly slowly, gradually watering the plants.  I don’t know whether this will be any better for them than pouring tap water into them, but it was a lot of fun to find a reason to play with snow inside.

My houseplants seem to love snow, and this is an easy way to feed them.

As pretty and useful as it is, I hope this is the LAST post about snow I will be writing this year!

For one last shot of the beautiful snow, here’s a wonderful photo sent to me by a reader, Susan, who photographed her church building one recent evening after choir practice.  Light shining in the darkness!

Susan took this after choir practice; I think it’s in New Hampshire. March 2015

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.