We had snow last night. Large wet flakes fell from a sky the color of old lead. There is something about a Southern Appalachian snow that touches me deeply. The hard blue sky slowly begins to fill in with smooth gray clouds that John Parris called a "Gray Goose Sky". As the clouds coalesce, the air begins to get colder and sharper, and it seems to wrap around you with a sort of pleasant cold that speaks of thousands of years of Mountain snows.
My mom called me as the clouds got thicker last evening, telling me of a time in her early life when she saw just such a day and cloud cover. She said she and her father were walking back from the barn after handing tobacco (another story for another time), and her father looked up and said "we're going to have a big snow tonight", and he was right. Of course, when you live near the land, get your livelihood from it, know every aspect of it, it will talk to you.
The snow obscures roads and paths, making the world new, or perhaps old. Perhaps the power goes out, and the twentieth and twenty first centuries retreat in the purity of white, and perhaps an older time is mutely glimpsed as a shade behind the snow, a time of working tobacco in a cold barn, gathering eggs at daybreak, feeding grain to the milk cow, of meat taken from the smoke house to be eaten with breakfast, of rabbits hunted in the snow because tracking was easier, and huddling around a fire in the evening, listening to an elder tell stories of days older still, how hard it was after The War (Between the States, perhaps), how the river froze so hard that a wagon and team of horses could be safely driven across, of people lost in winters past in a land still wild, and of their discovery in spring, when people were able to get out and about. Some of that wildness may still exist when the snow is on the ground, when it forms a mystic portal to ages past, and gives glimpses of a way of life now gone. At least it is for me.
The snow melts, showing the road, the Twenty First Century intrudes, a car horn sounds, a sand truck roars by, and it is gone. Until the next snow.
