Around here, it happens only slightly more often than leap year: snow.
Last night when Miska told the boys there was the possibility of white weather, Wyatt informed us that when he grows up, he wants us all to “move to Florida where it snows all the time.” We tried to let him down gently and move his compass either further north or further west. The boys stayed up a little late and went out on the back deck trying to feel and catch the first flakes dropping from the sky.This morning, we woke to a wide blanket of snow, the leaf-bare trees draped by white velvet. It was beautiful. Of course, Wyatt and Seth insisted on sprinting outside, needing (for the first time) their gortex winter ski gloves. Giddy with excitment, Wyatt blurted out, “This is the best winter ever.” Outside, Seth jumped in head first, the first to make a snow angel, the first to test our makeshift rubbermaid sled, the first to make a snowman.
Today, feeling snowflakes on my tongue and hearing Seth’s raucous laughter as he slid down the hill…Today, enjoying Wyatt’s wide eyes as he crafted the perfect snowball and concocted his best odds at launching it square between my eyes, my heart opened. I felt God alive in my boys. I watched and learned. Now, I repent of my callous heart that is often slow to be given to the moment, enraptured with the passion of where God is stirring life.
It takes me to a portion of Steinbeck’s The Winter of our Discontent Miska read to me last night:
I guess we’re all, or most of us, the wards of that nine-teenth-century science which denied existence to anything it could not measure or explain. The things we couldn’t explain went right on but surely not with our blessing. We did not see what we couldn’t explain, and meanwhile a great part of the world was abandoned to children, insane people, fools, and mystics, who were more interested in what is than why it is.
joy / winn
NOw I want to read the book…