DECEMBER 15, 2022 – This morning we looked out the window to see the landscape plastered with snow. Beautiful, I thought, because of its high moisture content; tough to shovel, however, and not optimal for skiing, but beggars can’t be choosers. We’re still in a drought.
Before breakfast, I went out to shovel. “High moisture content” turned out to be an understatement. It felt more like “high wet-concrete content.” With the prediction of much colder air by the weekend, I figured it would be prudent to get ahead of the curve and remove the “wet concrete” before it turned to the frozen variety. More of the same was on its way.
The weight of this snow was too much for the electric snowblower, so I resorted to the old-fashioned method: manual labor. With nose to the task, I worked for close to an hour, first on the driveway, then the sidewalks. About three-quarters of the way through the mission, I stopped briefly to lower the zipper of my parka and to admire the beauty of heaven’s blizzard of concrete.
As I pulled my right glove back on . . . thrummmpf!—a load of snow slipped off a tree branch above me and formed a wet, cold collar around my freshly exposed neck. “And Merry Christmas to you, too!” I said aloud to the prankish tree.
I looked up and was easily distracted by the spectacular—but hazardous—network of snow-blanketed branches of one of our boulevard maples. A couple of seeds and their “helicopter transports” had been caught in the mesh of twigs at the outer reaches of one of the lower branches. By their angle of repose, these two “seed helicopters” resembled small birds perched in the tree, and I marveled at them long enough for a nearby branch to drop a snow dumpling onto my shoulder.
The pelting gave me a sense of urgency about taking a picture, but not because more snow was sure to fall: the two “birds,” I thought instinctively, might fly straight away, as birds are wont to do. They didn’t, of course. The twigs had a firm grasp, and the air was still. I had ample time to aim and compose my shot before snapping it.
After capturing the “birds” with my iPhone, I watched them a while longer, thinking how beautiful they were. I looked around to see the broader winter wonderland that our neighborhood had become. My visual survey prompted the inevitable mental response: “Isn’t nature beautiful!” Yet, no sooner had the words formed when I questioned them. It isn’t nature by itself that’s beautiful, I told myself, but my eyes and mind—trained by life—that tell me it’s beautiful. Without humans to define and perceive what is beautiful, how else would nature be assigned that quality?
I continued shoveling, as the old carol—A Partridge in a Pear Tree—played inside my head and those “birds” maintained their . . . beautiful . . . perch.
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© 2022 by Eric Nilsson
