Throughstone #12: First Snow
Dec 02, 2025
Six decades+ and the first real snow of the year still stimulates whatever part of my brain these winter weather events tickled back when six was barely a shoe size, a birthday, or a grade within reach. And in North Carolina, we were lucky to get a first snow, much less a substantial one. For whatever reason, I always longed for real winters, with all of their mysteries and intensities and coziness. Vermont hasn’t disappointed.
The first snow is a marker, an invitation, a reminder, a transition. Nothing will be the same after this. Even if there’s a thaw and earth is laid bare, it will tend to be unforgiving, mercurial in its switch between icy hardness and primordial mud. At this point, you’re locked in, seasonally, and your attitude dictates most of the outcomes.
Today, the snow came in as an ever-downier cover, stealing sharp relief from the landscape and trading it for amorphous imaginings. Definition waned while softness took over. All of us home for a snow day -- winter’s version of an outgoing tide tugged at our feet, pulling us outward until the glow of hearth reversed the tidal pull and drew us back in. Then, the fullness of nightfall beckoned, and we donned all the layers again, trekking in divergent directions.
The world stilled, except for the unwitting slowing of waters, and silence held tight to the trees. Boughs bent with the heaviness of darkness while the forest refused to be an accomplice to the insanity beyond.
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Thoughts?? Your wisdom is appreciated in the "COMMENTS" box below!
“Throughstone 250” is a purposefully constrained blog project. As a long-winded Southerner constrained by Vermont’s limited porch season and the Yankee penchant for paragraphs of three words or less, I’ve opted to aim for semi-daily reflections of precisely 250 words for the foreseeable future.
250 means something right now. Maybe more than we anticipated. It’s symbolic but incredibly important…and a 250 word count seems much less constrained than a 5-7-5 syllable count for a haiku.
Like many others, I’m struggling to make meaning out of these tumultuous days. I’ve always found it useful to try and write my way out of tough spots. Looking for throughstones is just one more effort to try and generate some meaning from the mayhem.
More free-ranging rambles here, if you’re so inclined: https://www.freerangeprof.com/blog
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