First Snow

It wasn't much, just an inch or two, but it does qualify for the annals of wonderful things: all the positives so loved by us northern European types - clean, pure, white - and not yet any of the negatives - dirty, tiresome, icy, dangerous. I think it's also the contrasts we crave. Early snow is childhood innocence. It masks experienced greys and drab greens. It highlights the overwhelming sky, it etches the illimitable ocean. We like to think we can define the world in black and white, nature and development, good and evil. A view like this outlines us a little more clearly against the prospect of infinity.
Never mind that we don't really matter; that doesn't matter on a day like this. Ignore for the moment that this photo is taken from a paved road looking down on a green of the Megunticook Golf Club. It still makes me glad. (Although in the summer, the view contains beetling golf carts and large men in yellow slacks and slim women in Bermuda shorts - who are busy defining their own places in the cosmos, they imagine.) Snow is such an amazing contrast with, say, cornflowers, that not even the presence of uber-silly civilization can detract from the whole-nature, four-season view. And the sight of first snow makes it certain that I'll never give in to pre-packaged Florida.