As I write this, eastern Long Island is slated to get hit with 18+ inches of snow in a nor’easter this weekend. My neighbors must hear my squeals of joy echoing in the backyard.
Maybe because I was born in a snowstorm on a dark, cold night in December, just one week before Christmas, I have always loved snow. While most kids have a list of birthday wishes, mine consisted of only one: snow.
One of my favorite snow memories is the game my sisters and I used to play outside in the snow. It was called “fox and goose.” Our front yard became a maze of pathways with a “den” formed in the center. The person who plays the fox chases the geese around until she tags each goose and places her in the den.
We usually created the maze with shuffling feet and shovels during the day but played it after dark to add interest to the chase. The game was over when all the geese were captured or our faces were frozen from the pelting snow.
Making a snow fort was another fun endeavor for snowy days.
Merging two favorite seasons, we used beach pails and plastic shovels to form the walls by stacking them up and filling in the holes with newly packed snow. At night we poured water over the structure to harden it.
As number seven out of eight kids, I imagined that the snow fort was my own little apartment where I could live independently like my eldest siblings who were living away from home. In my snow fortress, I imagined that I was an explorer seeking safety from the perils of a blizzard or a mother protecting her young children when they got caught outside in a winter’s storm.
One of my favorite winter reads for kids is a book entitled “Snowflake Bentley” by Jacqueline Briggs Martin. It’s about a Vermont farmer named Wilson A. Bentley whose spent his life studying and photographing snow.
Bentley was schooled at home by his mother, a teacher who instilled in her son a love for learning. From a young age, Bentley was fascinated by snow. In his earliest experiments, Bentley collected snow to study under a microscope.
Though his father thought he was crazy to waste his time studying something that melts, Bentley’s parents later purchased him an expensive microscope camera with money that they had saved over the years working on their dairy farm. The camera could magnify the images of the snow crystals.
On January 15, 1885, Wilson Bentley became the first person to ever photograph a snow crystal. His parents’ investment turned a huge return for generations of students and scientists who still use Bentley’s research on snow crystals even today.
My kids and I spent many snowy days reading about Snowflake Bentley and capturing snow on black construction paper to examine the flakes under a magnifying glass and a microscope. Every snowfall meant a snow day in our homeschool. There was plenty enough science, reading, and math in a winter storm to qualify as academic study. Besides the fact that a snowstorm is just plain fun.
In an article entitled “Snow Beauties” Bentley wrote: “Here is a gem bestrewn realm of nature possessing the charm of mystery, of the unknown, sure to reward the investigator.”
Bentley was as much the poet as the scientist as he reflected in wonder at the amazement of the natural world around him — especially in the snow.
It is that “charm of mystery, of the unknown”, that Bentley writes which most compels my own love for snow. When I consider the intricacies of every snowflake, I see the inherent echo of a Master Creator and intelligent design-most especially in the fact that no two snowflakes are alike. Isn’t nature amazing?
It is this spiritual nature of snow that attracts me the most.
Snow envelops the world in a quiet that silences our busy lives and rambling brains and soothes our souls. It covers the earth on a drab winter day with the purity of fresh white snow beckoning us to quiet.
Here on Jo’s Farm, we spent the sunny days this week getting ready for the big snow. I loaded up the chicken feeder which holds 65 pounds of feed and did my weekend chores of cleaning the coop and run a few days early. We have heated waterers in the chicken run and in the goat house which work off of heavy duty extension cords plugged into an outside electric source. God knew when we bought this house that we would need to power a few things in the backyard.
The chickens really don’t like the snow, but their coop and run are protected from the wind and even heat up when the sun shines because we winterized them with corrugated plastic surrounding the walls and roof of the run.
A chicken’s body temperatures is around 105 degrees. They can stay warm as long as they are protected from drafts. I threw extra shavings and chopped hay into the coop to help the chickens stay warm.
I used to place shavings neatly arranged in the coop. But almost two years into this backyard adventure, the chickens have made it clear that they want to rearrange their little house according to their needs and preferences. So now i just dump the bedding into mounds for the ladies to work on it as they please.
The goats are very hardy animals as long as they have a shelter from the storm. We put up extra hay and feed and water and make sure they are secure in the their shed when the storm gets rough.
This morning I took Jo to get an MRI of her brain. It really doesn’t get easier, but we get better at doing the things we need to do, remembering that life is fragile and so needs to be treasured.
When we left the radiology center, Jo was tired and struggling with headaches and fatigue. But after I put her into the car, I reminded Jo that she had one more important task to be done to get ready for the big storm.
Jo had to deliver some fresh eggs to friends and neighbors who wanted Jo’s eggs to eat as they ride out the storm at home. Jo perked up as we talked about the people and the animals who need her to do her best.
Jo’s smile delivering eggs to all her customers is worth all the effort on Jo’s farm.
I tucked all the animals to bed at dark and went with Jo to wait for the coming storm. With the snow comes a stillness that settles on us, and even in our souls. The world around us slows down to our pace, giving us time to breathe and appreciate the quiet on Jo’s farm.
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