Silent Snow

Silent snow.
This year it has come earlier and more frequently than in recent years. It’s not
even the official start of winter yet.
The nincompoops will point to this as a refutation of Global Warming. They always seem to be the least well-informed among us and incapable of even noticing the ways in which the weather has already begun to behave oddly.

Silent snow.
I do love snow but I hate to drive my car in it.
One cannot deny its beauty, softness, strangeness and the wonderful way that it
dulls colors and creates a seemingly monochromatic environment.

I always loved Pieter Brueghel’s Hunters in the Snow.
It is a perfect image of a snowy winter world.
We haven’t changed. Humans haven’t changed. Brueghel captured our follies and misdeeds and loves and joys and labors and laziness and cruelty.
He did this in the sixteenth-century.

Silent snow.
Students wait for the bus as they do everyday. I peer down on them from across the street.
Their dark forms against the white ground recall Brueghel’s masterpiece. I wonder who they are, where they live, who their friends and family and loves are. Most, but not all, are quite young. They are on a quest. They are
hunters in their own right.
Hunting is in our DNA.
Not always....for food.