Special delivery

The falling of snow (!) last night sent me outside several times today – wool socks on, hiking boots laced, and ears well muffled – to see the beautiful white stuff that here in Alabama we see mainly in pictures. Tonight, in the early evening, I took one more trip out to the pasture. On the ground, a few inches of ice-glazed snow crunched underfoot. Above, the evening sky kept trying to shake off its faded white veneer of daylight but the reflection of snow kept it glowing with a kind of luminous twilight that shone like windswept porcelain.

I stood motionless for long minutes at the crest of the pasture, watching the tree line, listening to the evening, beginning to shiver, and slowly letting myself be enclosed by the cold white nightscape. The pale, ashen chill held me as if I were sealed within an envelope of white, like a letter to be delivered to a winter evening. Yet the real delivery, and a special delivery at that, was the rare gift of a snowy, snowy landscape here in the deep, deep South.

Postscript: Photos below are from our "back yard." Photos from the "front yard" of the monastery can be seen on our Community News web page.