feather flakes

A quiet, Christmas Eve kind of feather snow wandered its way down out of an expressionless sky, incongruous because of the green blush just beginning to return to the grass below, incongruous because just a few days ago it felt like spring. I watched it fall through an old stained-glass window hung incongruously in the back of a weathered but pleasant little kitchen, and sighed.

I would have adored this snow ... in mid-December, or even January.
There isn't much in the world that's as quiet and reverent as the whisper of over-sized white puffs of ice floating in the stillness of a winter morning. The serenity soaks in, and I can't help but remember that after all, this season has its charms, and it doesn't last forever.

But now March is almost over, and the time for snow has passed. The natural thing is to be irked by the frosty missiles that dare so belatedly to invade my hopeful spring. I didn't want to get my winter coat back out. I didn't want to slip and slide my way to work this morning in my obnoxiously un-snow-savvy car. I want to wear shorts and a t-shirt, and leave my flip-flops by the picnic table so I can drag my bare toes through the thickness of grass kissed by a low, golden sun. I want hot grilled hamburgers and melty ice cream cones. I want to dig in the rich earth and grind it into my fingernails, pull out the weeds because I have to, and pluck a tomato just because it's good.  I want warm summer rains and dim early mornings reaching cool and clear, right into heaven, almost.

What, you think I'm romanticizing it? Have you ever been alive in the spring of the year, or its summer? Yeah, so have I ... I know I'm romanticizing. But when it's been winter for, like, a hundred months, and you've finally gotten this delicious taste of life coming back into the air, and then it snows - I mean, come on. What are you supposed to do?

But as I cocked my head and wished all the little flakes back into December so I could enjoy them properly, I suddenly realized that their location in time didn't change what they were. They were still beautiful.

This is spring. This is Iowa. This is life.

I have dreams and fondest-wishes for my own life, many of which I've held in my little heart a long time now, some of which are new and still developing, one or two of which border on being actual plans. Some of them have looked like coming true at times - and, truth be told, some of them have come true. I've touched the ocean and stood on mountains, after all. But other hopes, reaching out from the world to touch my stretched fingers, have drawn back again. The sky envelopes itself back into grey, and familiar white crystals melt on my disappointed face.

Not yet, they whisper, not yet. It's still winter. 

But I've had winter already, I cry. When will it be enough?

The little white flakes just keep falling quietly, incongruous through the old stained-glass I hung as a child in my palace window, for my wonderful, shining future life to stream through. And where is that shining life? My palace is a little old kitchen.

But when I tilt my head and look out again to curse the relentless whiteness, in the silence I hear instead a whispered blessing:

Be still, and know that I am God.

My ways are not your ways, little child. Do you doubt my wisdom? Do you doubt my love? Hear My voice in the quiet, and draw close to Me while it's still. In My time, spring will come again.

There is joy in summer, and work to be done, to be sure. But the same is true of winter, and for now, this is where I am. The feather flakes are still beautiful, even in March.