Pure, infallible snow...

You made it through the work day and navigated through the teeming rush hour traffic to find your way home. Now, with your cat in your lap or your dog at your feet, you are relaxing in your favorite chair, or on your favorite couch. You look beyond the Christmas lights and lingering holiday decorations to take in the scenery outside your bay window, only to find that there is no snow. Not a glimmer. Not a flake.

Not even in the northernmost part of the country. Not this year.

Pure and infallible

Let me share with you my own opinion of snow.

I once wrote a poem about snow, though this particular poem was written in between seasons. I came to know the inspiration on a dark night, when the air was cold and crisp, and the grass outside of my home was gilded with frost. I was missing someone, and my heart ached for the changing of the seasons. I yearned for the opportunity to reunite with the person in my thoughts.

So I wrote about the frost. I wrote about the way the street lights played off the tips of each blade of grass, causing them to sparkle and shine. And I wrote about the foreboding, the knowledge frost brings that winter is fast on its way.

Only, I love snow. I crave it — and not in dustings or gentle blankets that fall on the horizon only until they achieve the color white — but in banks and snowdrifts and seas of crystallized water droplets that close an entire city and challenge the traveler.

In fact, I once drove through a snow storm like this, as I wanted to be snowed in at home as opposed to stranded at work, and everyone on the 70 m.p.h. interstate highway was reduced to driving no faster than 20, stopping every so many miles to clear the windshield wipers of the accumulating snowfall. That was in Minnesota, and it was also my first encounter with "thundersnow," during a storm that shot thunder and lightning across a white horizon in a nearly blinding experience. But that's another story.

The frost that I was hoping would yield to snow covered the horizon when I was a college student in Oxford, Ohio. And what I wished for was specifically this: That the frost would yield to "a pure and infallible snow," a feature of nature that is clean and white, and turns even the most industrialized of cities into a quiet natural scene, if only for a moment. My hope was that all that was in transition at the time would finally achieve its goal, that autumn would yield to winter, and that what I considered to be the most beautiful time of year would finally arrive.

And so, it snowed.

The winter of my discontent

Give what reasons you will for the failure of the snow to fall this year.

Especially in central Minnesota, as we cross our fingers in hopes that the snow is not waiting to come all at once, it is difficult to ignore the fact that little has fallen. It is normally resting in heaps around our homes and places of business by this time of year.

In fact, the St. Paul Winter Carnival, the nation's largest and oldest winter festival, is at risk of flopping due to the weather. I don't know if that's a first, but it is undoubtedly rare. It is also very rare to not have a White Christmas in these northern parts.

Here is the reason, for me, that the snow has not fallen this year:

Again, it comes back to loss. Grief. The pain and sorrow of not having someone beautiful in your life — four beautiful someones.

I believe that Nature grieves with us. 

It rained for a week in Ohio after four of my immediate family members died. The heavens filled with tears, crying in streams down upon the earth. Once the funeral services were done and four caskets were driven away from the church, a rainbow dared to cross the sky.

A candlelight vigil was held for my twin brothers that night at the middle school, sharing stories of their chess prowess and their natural talents for math and music. And the next day, I saw white storm clouds forming in the south and dark storm clouds forming in the north.

Rays of light broke through the clouds with such radiance on my summer travels that I could almost believe my brothers and my family were still with me here on earth. But now, at least in my world, Nature mourns them.

The reason no snow fell on my Christmas is that something beautiful and sweet was missing. For me, the reason the land looks stark and barren, with naked trees and no snow to cover them, is that something pure is missing from the earth.

Allow me this notion, in the face of my grief, especially as the youngest to pass away were two of the most intelligent, compassionate, faithful teenagers one could ever come to know. Having just turned 13, they were leaders, inspiring everyone around them to goodness and strength.

. . .

Nature is still hurting from such a great loss, so the climate cannot yield to a pure and infallible snow.