SNOW LOAVES

Big night snow still falling, transforming our pastoral world into idyllic white; a cornucopia of nostalgia and snow down your neck from cedar trees. Gorgeous rich curlicues of windcarved snowloaves adorning the deck rails and roofs and bushes and trees and rocks and everything, observer warm by wood fire. For brief moments among gouts of white that the wind brings down from the forests, the Lake is visible, a gray swath of moire silk spread out before some mountains dim and snowclad, in glimpses of distance as in a Chinese painting-- then just a few flakes and a bit of gold suncoin is scattered over the white countryside in a procession of noblesse oblige at the heart of the snowstorm-- then back to clouds of snowflakes I see swirling all along the mountain and down in the village from clumps of trees when they are touched by the wand of the wind, poof: now it's white, then it's green, then it's gone!!

And looking at the Lake, unlike as at the sea, one can see the corridors in the palace of the wind, and how the wind has many rooms and vast, and how it is yet the palace of a dragon, that travels the world at its whim and dances its dance over land and water alike; on land we rarely see the palace chambers except in a whirlwind now and then, but the comparatively calm mirror of the Lake is its open stage, where the architecture of the wind is plain, its undulations like the land turned upside down and made liquid, peopled by beings with the voices of trees...