first snow

(would have been more appropriate a week ago, but since it's still on the ground I can justify it.)

The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how, whence such beauty and what the meaning; such
an oracular fever! flowing
past windows, an energy it seemed
would never ebb, never settle
less than lovely! and only now,
deep into night,
it has finally ended.
The silence
is immense,
and the heavens still hold
a million candles; nowhere
the familiar things:
stars, the moon,
the darkness we expect
and nightly turn from. Trees
glitter like castles
of ribbons, the broad fields
smolder with light, a passing
creekbed lies
heaped with shining hills;
and though the questions
that have assailed us all day
remain—not a single
answer has been found—
walking out now
into the silence and the light
under the trees,
and through the fields,
feels like one.

–Mary Oliver

"blizzard" in tucson

Tuesday afternoon Colin (along with half the city, apparently) got a notification on his phone that there was a blizzard warning for Wednesday. Facebook blew up with people laughing about it - someone, somewhere, clarified that it was for Mt. Lemmon, not the valley.

I had to force Joley to put on a long-sleeved shirt that morning. She'd been running around outside in short sleeves for at least a week.

By midday Wednesday, we weren't joking about the possibility of snow anymore, and instead there was that sort of tingling in the air - everyone kept peeking out windows at the frigid rain, hoping it had changed into flakes.

I happened to be standing by a bank of windows overlooking the cafeteria when it changed over. The kids went from huddled miserably under awnings to dancing in the open, taking pictures of themselves making silly faces with snowflakes on their heads.

I stood later in the library and watched it come down and tried to capture it on my phone. It was too wet to stick, then, and I won't subject you to those pictures, with the florescent lights suspended oddly in the sky from the reflection of the library windows.

It stopped and started perhaps four times throughout the day. These pictures were taken when I got home. The whole thing was rather surreal and magical - I've seen snow in Tucson before, once every few years or so, but never this much.

The cold rather killed the remaining oranges, though.

I'm forever fascinated by snow-lined branches and the patterns they make. It was always my favorite part of snowfalls in Flagstaff.

Sign of the imminent overheating of the earth or not, it was a lovely day.

snowy evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

I'm not a big Frost fan. His poems are so often bandied about (and beaten to death in high school literature classes) that they've become cliché.

"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," though, has never lost its appeal to me. The simple use of repetition to create the underlying metaphor always, always resonates - and the imagery is so clear and lovely it makes me long for snow and winter.

I miss the northern part of the state very much, especially around this time of year.