On the Occasion of the First Snow of the Season

I do hope this short little blog posts lives up to the lofty title I’ve given it.

“On the Occasion of the First Snow of the Season,” which I will follow with a subtitle of:

“Down a Rabbit Hole of Poems, Quotes, and Musings Through the Ages Regarding the Marvels and Mysteries of Waking Up to Observe a Landscape Once Bare Now Covered with Snow.”

Did you like my imitation of a title that might have appeared at the turn of the last century, by which I mean the 19th century turning to the 20th century? (One must be clear about this because some people might think that I meant the turning of the 20th century to the 21st century, which was nearly 25 years ago.)

But regarding that first snow on Thursday, the 21st of November of this year, as I write this blog post, finally, on Friday, the 22nd of November, 99 percent of that snow is now gone.

But to deliver on the promise of the subtitles…

J. B. Priestly wrote long ago,

“The first fall of snow is not only an event, it is a magical event. You go to bed in one kind of a world and wake up in another quite different…“

That is certainly true. When I woke up, I knew without looking out the window that the world was now different, the ground was covered by snow. I knew because there is a different kind of light peeking through the window blinds when there is snow on the ground. I can’t describe it, but I know it when I see it.

That sentence written by J. B. in a novel called Apes and Angels (1928)ends with:

“and if this is not enchantment, then where is it to be found?”

It is pure enchantment, to be sure, but when it arrives seemingly “all of a sudden” after a decidely warm, slow, languid fall, the gardener in me looks out the windows and makes note of a few fall clean-up items not yet completed. Cover fig bases with leaves, take in bird bath in front, clean up the ginkgo tree leaves, which have for the first time in several years actually turned a golden yellow before falling to the ground, but goodness, they fall kind of late. I suppose that gives me that excuse I was looking for to mow one last time and to use my new portable leaf blower/vacuum that does a marvels job of sucking up leaves and crunching them into little pieces… which will be perfect for coving the bases of the figs.

Anyway.

Edith Romig Fuller wrote a poem about the first snow:

“The snow wipes out the writing of the year;
Its swift erasers softly surely pass
Across the hieroglyphics of the grass
And clean the slate of summer spear by spear.

Where was a tale of gardens there is now
A smudged and undecipherable scrawl,
And where illumined lettering of fall
A dim-inked outline of an austere bough.”

Edith probably deserves a closer reading of her poems because she was Oregon’s third Poet Laurette, from 1957 to 1965. I kind of like that poem, so I made a quick graphic of it.

I looked for one last poem about the first snow, this time turning not to the internet, but to a slim book of poetry by Elizabeth-Ellen Long. She wrote a poem called “After Snow” in which, surprisingly, the word “snow” is never used. Interesting. The internet knows little of the poet, Elizabeth-Ellen Long, who wrote many poems with nature themes. I think I’ll make her a Lost Lady of Garden Writing to tell the internet a bit about here, so she won’t be so lost.

That’s enough about the first snow of the year. It has indeed “wiped out the writing of the year” and “cleaned the slate of summer” as Edith Romig Fuller once wrote. It’s time to start a new chapter in this garden and get serious about winter gardening around here, starting with putting up some Christmas lights!

With a shared love of gardening…