Silent Night, George Sotter; 1932

SNOW falls on the good and the wicked.

It falls on the proud and the humble, the arrogant and the shy, the successful and the incompetent, the rich and the indebted.

Snow is undiscriminating. It lands on the heads of snow lovers and snow haters. An invisible painter, working only in white, reaches out with his brush. He dabbles on the car, on gloves, on the wings of chickadees, on industrial wastelands. He erases the outlines of the world with his dissolving medium. John Ruskin, the 19th century art critic, wrote, “Pictures of winter scenery are nearly as common as moonlights, and are usually executed by the same order of artists, that is to say, the most incapable.” Perhaps, but who can compete with the original artist?

Emily Dickinson explains:

It sifts from leaden sieves,
It powders all the wood,
It fills with alabaster wool
The wrinkles of the road.

It makes an even face
Of mountain and of plain, —
Unbroken forehead from the east
Unto the east again.

It reaches to the fence,
It wraps it, rail by rail,
Till it is lost in fleeces;
It flings a crystal veil

On stump and stack and stem, —
The summer’s empty room,
Acres of seams where harvests were,
Recordless, but for them.

It ruffles wrists of posts,
As ankles of a queen, —
Then stills its artisans like ghosts,
Denying they have been.

We cannot hold up our hands and stop it from falling. We — and the roof over our heads — are part of the canvas.

Please follow and like us: