A Time to Reflect...

Winter makes me moody, but it also offers great time for introspection. This must be due, in part, to the fact that I spend more time alone, and less out enjoying the world with friends. In Minneapolis, I had learned to take up outdoor hobbies in the winter, in order to ward off the inevitability of cabin fever. I would go snowshoing out on the city's lakes, where the ice was always thick enough by December to support ice-fishing, let alone one small-statured snowshoer. Even this, though, was often a solitary activity: it is hard to convince others to join. In the winter, people prioritize and maximize their time outdoors, and I found that my snowshoing schedule was unlikely to sync up with the outdoor recreations of many others.

This weekend, a full snow that finally promises to stick has blanketed the ground in Pittsburgh. I rather enjoy the aesthetic of clean, white snow on the roofs of red-brick row-houses. The city seems like a Norman Rockwell painting to me-- old, colonial Americana.

Near Frick Park, where the homes are not packed as tightly together, there is more snow-- large front lawns are blanketed with thin layers of it, and the branches of pine trees within the park are visibly weighed down by piles of it. I like watching the branches shake, and the snowflakes catapult down as if thrown by a snow-blower. I imagine that this happens either as a matter of physics, or from the intrusion of some animal that climbs the tree's trunk and inadvertantly nudges a branch.

There's no birdsong in the park today-- they have all flown south. But even in the blankness of a snowy landscape, I can see signs of life. This is the time of year when you can easily observe animal tracks. Some of the paths that crisscross the park paths were clearly left by dogs-- neat, tidy paw-prints. But there is evidence of other creatures, too. Rabbits have left their thumpings on the snow, straying from the paths towards invisible burrows, and I see what appears to me to be deer prints, as well.

I am reminded, again, of the real color of fresh snow, as the sun begins to wane in the sky (the days have gotten quite short). My part of Frick park is mostly open-- a somewhat wide expanse of flat ground encircled by trees. Here, the sun hits the snow-- unobstructed by branches. I begin to notice how different dips and ledges in the snowbanks made up from small elevations underneath can change colors, casting watered out blue or purple shadows.

The sky is also quite clear and dry, not like how cloudy it was before the snow arrived. Here, I am left to contemplate, too, the idea of rejuvenation in nature. We have weathered a storm (albeit not a bad one), and the clouds have parted and the sky has opened up in a sort of divine way.