Two weeks before the first day of Spring, I peered through my bedroom window to observe a beautiful panorama of fresh fallen snow. Snowflakes appeared everywhere — in the woods, over the lawn, and on my shrubbery, cascading downwardly into my yard. The snow balanced perfectly on the tree branches, lightly compacting to form white arms following nature’s shape, twisting and undulating on twig and limb, portraying dark irregular images below a pure white matching layer, several times thicker. Snow caps obscured the shrubbery tops, and much of their sides, displaying a random patchwork of white accented with flecks of green. The white blanketed lawn remained unblemished by any imperfections from bird or animal activities, beauty at its best.

While admiring this exquisite beauty, my eyes irresistibly shifted to the asphalt pavements and delightfully confirmed no accumulation, thus exhibiting a stark black and white contrast, with sporadic sprigs of green life on a sunless day. To my mind, any snowfall that fails to accumulate on the roadways qualifies as the prettiest of all. One can appreciate its full beauty without disturbing visions of snow shovels — or plows that block the driveway exit with a snow rampart, thus adding chores and inconvenience to one’s day. Snow beauty sans inconvenience makes the tranquil scene more pleasurable.

As I absorbed myself within the three dimensional bucolic scene, I recalled some lines from Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” A driver had stopped his horse drawn carriage to watch the “woods fill up with snow” and when his horse gave “his harness bells a shake” to continue down the road, the only other sound the driver heard: “the sweep of easy wind and downy flake.” These words described my sense as I observed one of nature’s finest moments from the warm side of my bedroom window.