Winter Wonderland for a brief couple of hours

It snowed last night, the kind of snow I have never seen before. The air remained perfectly still, the temperature was hovering just under freezing, the humidity was high. The total snowfall must have been about three inches, and anything that hit on any kind of tree branch, telephone line, or fence wire stuck to it, so that even the thinnest tree branch, one even more slender than a standard pencil, had a 2" pile of snow on top of it. The entire landscape was white, almost blindout white. At the bus stop around 6:30 there were men shoveling the sidewalks, and I could tell by their efforts how heavy and water-logged the snow was.

As I entered the campus grounds of the gimnazium I could only shake my head in amazement at how incredibly lovely the grounds looked, smothered in a blanket that was so perfect it looked like it had jumped out of a Currier and Ives Hallmark Precious Moments painting by Kincade. I reached the English teachers' office on the second floor and looked out at the lake and across to the hills about 6/7 miles away: there was a slight opening in the clouds overhead and a pool of brightness sparked on a portion of the hill. Down on the lake, about a mile away, there were about 5,000 geese gathered at the edges of the ice sheet.

I had class at 8 AM; i took one last look at the scene and then we got immersed in Temple Grandin, the rights of animals, whether animals were only property or more than, the writing style of Grandin's article, PETA, confiscation of property by a socialist regime , abortion rights, justifications for war, and by the end of the period the temperature had warmed up and the snow had begun to drop off of the branches.

Now it late afternoon and all is brown water and sludge.