My First Beautiful Snow

It happened.  It snowed last week, in October.  Had I still been in Michigan, I might've been pissed.  Snow there isn't pretty.  It's gray, and it piles up near the curbs and gets slushy and gray within minutes of falling.  It's joyless.

That's not how it happens here.  The sky stays blue.  The air remains crisp.  The snow is breathtakingly white as long as it's on the ground, and when it melts, quickly (since the sun is always out here), what it leaves behind is still vibrant, not washed out and drowned.  I love it.

Behold.

Have I Mentioned the Stars?

Because they're pretty amazing.  Ever since we had that assembly (that I imagine every single public school elementary student experiences in third or fourth grade) where the science people brought the dome shaped balloon big enough for us to crawl into and lie down in so they could project the constellations on the roof of our miniature planetarium, I've nurtured a passing, non-academic interest in the stars.  While this not-quite-obsession hasn't yielded any scholarly or serious pursuits, it has made me one of those people who gushes when the sky is particularly clear at night, and who thrills at identifying the Big Dipper (one of only three I can recognize with any reliability) or at spying a shooting star.  

It's one of my favorite things about camping, and now about my new home.  It's also one of my favorite things about mythology - I love knowing that the characters in the stories I devour are immortalized in the heavens, somewhere, even if I can't locate them there myself.  There's something wonderful about it, and I can't quite put my finger on why, because I'm not nearly as taken with reading tea leaves or following old commandments, but I love how connected I feel, when I look up at the sky to all the people who've done it before, not just now, but thousands of years ago, all over the world.