This snow seemed to arrive quickly in the evening, like a surprise, or it would have been without the Weather Channel’s radar and the endless beforehand “harping” on it by the weather reporters. Maybe the fact the snow’s predicted arrival was off by about an hour or so injected that little bit of “old-time” surprise into the mixture.

Before long, the snow was falling so heavily that it resembled a blizzard, a rather straight-down blizzard, as it seemed there was not enough wind to make it venture sideways.

And it seemed SOMETHING was turning over that “great bucket” of snow in the sky at the wrong angle for it to fall at a measured pace throughout the night. And that SOMETHING, which was calling the shots, had dumped it like the faux Indians of Boston Harbor had dumped the East India Tea Company’s tea. This use of the word “Something” is just my attempt at weaving flowery, historical, semi-scary stuff! I’m really not hearkening back to some great, Godzilla-sized, rude Teutonic “snow god” dressed in animal fur, horned helmet, and tipping over something 100 times the size of a snow-filled Danville Public Works container with the tip of a tremendous spear.

Of course, there was no moon to be seen that night; and earlier in the day, the sun was so dimmed by the thickening clouds that all that was left to be seen was a faint, barely glowing disk in the sky. It looked like a glowing moon which had been wiped clean of its “personality” (craters, mountains, flat dry ‘seas’).

Looking out several hours later, I saw the yard stretching away, illuminated by what looked like moonlight; but this was snow-painted moonlight! And so, the snow had painted night’s shadows away.

I later switched on the outer light and looked down at the nearest expanse of bulb-illuminated, fallen snow. I saw myriad mica-like glints of light acting like crystal prisms, scattering the different colors of the rainbow set against a quartz-like base. The thought occurred to me that this is what a frozen rainbow looks like when it falls to the earth and shatters.

In the morning’s light, the “snow quilt” looked “fuzzy,” like some of those “vintage” fedora style hats of the last century, or the mohair sweater I used to wear in high school back in the 1960s (well, maybe not that fuzzy). I guess it was because of the angle of the morning sunlight. It looked like the uppermost surface of the snow was covered with millions of tiny, faint gray half-dime (but not a nickel)-sized shadows. It seemed to me this “fuzzy” look had been caused by those last-fallen snowflakes not lying flat at the end of their fall; but instead, being “spiked” at a slight angle like a glacier climber’s ice axe (think Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer’s Ukon Cornelius) in the snow. When the sunlight struck those millions of angled snowflakes, those millions of pale “fuzzy” shadows were cast.

Elsewhere, some of the darkness of the night which had been “snow painted” seemed to have returned in the stark mid-morning shadows of tree trunks and limbs.

A few hours later, the melting had produced something strange looking on the back adjacent concrete deck. There were a series of evenly spaced round clumps of snow separated by melted spaces. For the life of me, I can’t even fathom the cause of this phenomenon! There must be more to the “mechanics of melting” than meets the eye (but still much simpler than celestial mechanics). Simply because of the spherical shape of these snow “orbs,” I like to think they represent some snowballs of that same snowfall which were never made, never thrown.

The snow, even though only 2 ½ inches deep, had re-worked the topography of the yard’s surface into a multitude of little hillocks and dimples, which by the time of the afternoon sun was changing again.

The fallen snow was now “falling” interminably slowly, melting down from that last 2 ½  inches above the soil. Where there had been little “hillocks,” there were now the protruding upper stalks of clumps of grass. These were like a roof’s supporting “rafters’ being exposed.

The “fuzziness” had disappeared with the snow’s top layer melting into water, kind of like a mother’s spittle fingers calming her son’s forelock before having his photo taken.

In the Old Testament’s 78 Psalm, manna is described as being sweet and falling from the sky like snow (well, snow is sweet when you add milk, sugar, and vanilla to make snow cream).

Over these past several years, there seem to be fewer and smaller snowfalls in our area of South-Central Virginia. Perhaps our first appreciable snow of  winter 24/25 was like manna to those winter-loving souls who “need a little snow” (in the same vein as “We Need a Little Christmas!”).