Dustings...
Meaning when it snows just enough....
Hello lovely ones, welcome to my hill in a wild and forgotten pocket of SW France, thank you for sharing your precious spare minutes with me. I know I always say this — I will again and again — I appreciate every single one of you, consider yourselves all loved and hugged!
Today — which is now a week after the Saturday I wandered pyjama clad under a fleece into a glistening snowy morning — the colour of the sky is milky, that is to say soft at the edges, calm without a hint of sunshine but glowing with the sort of winter light that I know somewhere not so far away is shedding snowflakes like the petals of a Hawthorne caught in a wayward spring breeze. In the distance are Les Monts de Cantal, their lunar-scape blanketed in white, their peaks a wintry jagged line across the horizon, permanent, unassailable proof of time, changes wrought to a landscape in the infinite cycling of seasons.
The vision of loveliness seen by my own ecstatic eyes as I wandered back to the house last Saturday was one such change, fleeting by comparison, barely a speck in time even but equally perceptible, equally astonishing.
I want to tell you something. Again. I want to tell you that a morning of winter gorgeousness can unleash childlike excitement. How waking to a silence dressed in just enough white at sunrise can create gold dust. I want to show you the magic of snow…
It began the night before on an evening after a day that had drained me a thousand times. Snow fell suddenly, lightened a sky that had rested as low and heavy and as dark as my spirits for all the daylight hours; the weight of Friday was like no other. Staring bright-eyed with excitement and a deep fatigue caused by the hopelessness of earlier futilities, watching, entranced by a trillion flakes falling, I dare to hope they will stay, just for a day.
An eerie light seeping through the night sky gives away the day. Before I unfurl myself from the warmth of duck down and tangled linen, before I arrange limbs to wakefulness, before, even, the silence shouts from the distance of an aubergine horizon or from the fields where the farmer rattles hay into the cattle feeder for his herd, I know. Outside there is a blanket of snow. It is not yet light but I know by the ethereality of the glow, like moonlight on a field of barley.
A warm fleece and camera thrown over nightclothes, jeans and fleecy socks is as undressed and dressed as I have the courage to be. Outside, the thermometer on a frozen terrace wall tells me it is five degrees below freezing. It feels colder. Both barn doors are frozen on cranky iron runners, I kick them loose — a trick only known by those who have to — pry the two chestnut doors apart with fingers already burning from cold, measure food into two buckets.
Behind three sets of warm woolly ears waiting for their breakfast, I defrost my fingers. The fourth, Milly, emerges adorable, face-masked by frosted flakes, oblivious and beautiful. She nudges me, paws the air before her head disappears into the bucket with the others; four black heads, eight ears protruding, buried in a bucket, is an unbearable cuteness even in subzero temperatures! .
Through the woodland, airy after last weekends — T-Shirt warm — travail, there are tracks; a fox, curiously, has dug up the ashes of my fire, a young deer has wandered up and down my paths and a squirrel has scampered hither and thither between ghostly ash trees as though concerned he has misjudged the edge of the season. Five hens and a cockerel refuse to leave their coop as is now their habit. I feed them inside. Snow doesn’t usually visit these hills in November.
I turn to the house, to warmth, hot tea, to the certain agony of thawing fingers just as a first shimmering ray of sun spills over the hill.
The light is glorious.
And, evanescent.
It is every longing I harbour each winter, a cinematic fantasy playing out and I don’t want to miss a single exquisite second — it may be the only snow day we have!
“Do you know what the mathematical expression is for longing? ... The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you are missing something.”
― Peter Høeg
Still dressed in half bedclothes half farm clothes, ignoring toes now joining in solidarity with frozen fingers, I walk in the opposite direction, disappearing into dawn creeping over the hills. Trees, some still holding onto autumn, explode into a kaleidoscope of iced copper and tangerine, every branch choreographed into an art piece so finely and precisely they seem like deliberate etchings, perhaps designed solely for filtering sunlight? They are whispers from the north. Everything is softened, the violence of bleakness is absent both above and below, the only sound, gentle dustings…
I am wandering in gold dust, enchanted as a child at her first pantomime.
I lose two magical hours.
By evening every flake of snow has returned to river and sky and ocean, me, I am still floating on the memory…
“Well, I know now. I know a little more how much a simple thing like a snowfall can mean to a person”
― Sylvia Plath
Briefly — I am nursing a fragile, too young, heart. It is everything.
With snow-kissed love
"Behind three sets of warm woolly ears waiting for their breakfast, I defrost my fingers."
I'd have gladly walked a mile in a heavy frost or light rain to read that one sentence, to travel the universe in its quiet truth, that level of intimate understanding.
Lordy, woman.
What beauty!!!! You + M. Nature + little Milly for her adorable moxie make an incredible team. So much golden laced crystalline wonder. I watched your slides and then watched again, feeling like a child on her first snow day. Thank you Susie!