Winter is gradually drawing to a close, and (here I must lower my voice so as not to be overheard by anyone who might doubt my sanity) on the day of the first thaw, I was surprised by the regret I felt that it had passed so quickly. I was not yet ready to part with air so clean and cutting that to take deep breaths of it must surely have added years of health to our lives; nor our weekly routine of bundling up against the piercing cold to throw and stack a week's supply of firewood outside our door, nor the countless treks late at night, returning home after long days in town with snow so deep we had to leave the car up the road and hike with arms full of groceries down our long driveway, through driving snow or under vast starry skies, through softly falling downy flakes or a hushed moonlit wonderland, but always through this deep stillness.
Whether softest powder, glistening ice, cold so dry it caused crispy crunching at every step, piercing micro-sleet, or smoothest drifts of whitest smoothest cream, I have not enough words to describe how deeply I have loved this winter here in beautiful Cape Breton. So much have I loved it and been moved by its unearthly stillness and its majesty and beauty that I am aware that my life on earth has been altered by it.
Every season is a gift, with the Creator's goodness imprinted in ways beyond counting. This year, winter's gift in this far northern wilderness has been a rarity of breathtaking purity so great that David and I have felt sometimes, standing in this profoundest silence of falling snow, or walking like a whisper under a thousand stars, or through the stillness of a corridor of diamonds more magnificent than any dream on earth, that surely we are just a breath this side of heaven, if not already there in one of God's most holy secret places.
"Have you entered the storehouses of the snow?.... And the frost of heaven, who has given it birth?" (Job 38:22,29) As long as we live, our hearts will be marked by the gift this season of beauty beyond imagining has been to us, and for this profound gift we give profoundest thanks.
