Trees in Snow

It snowed pretty much all day on Sunday. Great big, fat, fluffy flakes, light as the feathers on an angel's wings. It was delightful to watch, and we didn't have anywhere else we had to be. Which can be a good thing when it snows, as the roads can get rather treacherous.

Monday morning, we awoke to a fresh blanket of sparkling white. The sun was out for a bit, and we ran outside just after the first morning light hit the yard. Me with my camera, to capture the snow before it started to leave. My husband, to clear the driveway with the new shovel I had picked up at the store last week, after we broke one of our two remaining snow shovels removing the mid-week round of heavy, dense snow, topped with ice.

These are the trees that line the edge of our property that borders the road. I figure they are my trees because I planted them. In the first winter that I lived in the house, a January ice storm brought down a lot of trees. The following week, I received a mailing from the Arbor Day Foundation, and so in an attempt to restore good tree karma, I ordered a bunch of trees.

We started with the free trees that the Arbor Day peeps sent us. And then I went on to order probably a hundred more. Tiny little things they were. They arrived in the mail and my husband laughed at each batch, laughed at me. "More dead twigs through the mail!" he said.

But I had faith in those twigs. Or if not faith, at least hope. I planted them (some of them, I planted on my birthday one year, so their birthday is the same as mine), watered them, and some of them lived. Not as many as I'd hoped. But some. As they grew taller, he stopped laughing, started helping with the watering. He loves trees; we both do.

And so this is the little line of trees now. They are several feet tall and growing taller each year. Soon they will form a very nice tree buffer between us and the road, blocking visuals, blocking noise. And the bonus is that when it snows, they look like a scene straight out of a Christmas card.

The soundtrack for this wintry scene is Enya, Amid the Falling Snow.

A million feathers falling down,
A million stars that touch the ground,
So many secrets to be found
Amid the falling snow.