Elaine Christensen Quotes on Snow (2 Quotes)

Covenant Water runs from a spout below my open window. A February sun thaws what's left of Thursday's storm. It is a day of whites and blues a squint-eyed day, a hold-still, breathe-deep day. When God made the world and put Adam and Eve in the garden of greens and orchids and grapes, part of Him longed for the day when they would discover winter. When it snows in the South, parents wake their children, even at three in the morning to see flakes like goose feathers, to feel them tingling on their eyelids. Children can't begin to understand what is given them, what it costs, that the cost doesn't matter. Dear God, don't let me take this day for granted. White edges every fence. Each roof is an untouched field. The honey locust offers clumps of snow like winter fruit left unpicked in its limbs. The ponderosa spreads voluminous petticoats out to dry. Light refracts, splinters across the snow like sequins scattered and hand-sewn on my daughter's wedding veil. It is a day for making vows, the kind you tell no one, the kind you keep.

LEAVE-TAKING Leave-taking is not birds gathered for one last hymn to summer on thin branches of an empty tree, nor grass, sodden and bent beneath winter's first rain-heavy snow. Leave-taking is not the sun reluctant to smile in a lowering sky, nor the moon taking leave of the stars at dawn one by one. Leave-taking is not the wind suddenly hushed in the rocking cradle of trees, nor the waves stunned and dazed, staring glassy-eyed after the parting storm. Leave-taking is not birds, grass, sun, moon, wind or waves for these will all come again. Will you.