Snow

There really are few sights more soothing than watching big white flakes falling gently to the ground. On Thursday morning it snowed in New York in that rare and wonderful way, without wind and without excess. At most a couple of inches fell in nearly complete silence as we watched from behind our wall of windows facing East. It was as unreal as viewing the white particles that float inside one of those glass balls that you shake just to make it "snow" all over again. Looking out those windows, you could see the sidewalks and the streets attracting a thin layer of snow and the branches of the line of trees just out of reach developing an icing that made them seem especially enticing.

Is part of the appeal of such a day the desire to live in that glass ball, cut off from the cares and woes of our everyday lives? To just be as those countless flakes come to rest on our head and shoulders in a continuous, unending cycle? Without purpose, without any little items to check off our to-do list, we can exist for a while in a lovely bubble of nothingness where, as the poet Wallace Stevens says, we can can hold in our hearts "the nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."