Looking out the window, I see snow is falling again. We already got what looks like ten centimeters over-night. Much more and I might have had to blow the lane before I go to work.

I should not complain. Many years, I've already blown the lane by now. I've often had cross country skies out, and at least once, made it down hill skiing.

And I'm torn, I will admit. I am looking forward to both kinds of skiing. But I do not enjoy driving in the dark with snow falling, and I am out several nights this week.

Turned out I needn't have worried. The temperature rose, and most of the snow melted the day it fell.

Snow generates this complex mix of feelings. In one way, it is a relief to see the bright blanket of white after the grey of November. That month gives us the refuse of wet dead leaves and wilted grass, the bare empty branches of trees, and the silence left when so many birds head south and frogs sleep.

The grey skies and early dusk can be depressing. Once there is snow on the ground, reflecting back all the ambient light, even night is bright. And when the clouds go, moon and stars are brilliant in the clear night sky.

As the blanket of snow deepens, there is a sense of rest. Insects and fish, amphibiens and reptiles have burrowed into safe places to wait out the cold. From now until February, many mammels will sleep. We'll see the footprints of an adventurous rabbit or fox on the new snow, but until the days get longer, the mice will be hidden.

Sometimes that blanket completely masks the land, covering field and land and road so thoroughly that we have no idea what the shape of the land is. It can be oppressively heavy.

As I watched the snow fall, I thought of the poetry of Robert Frost. He wrote about many aspects of rural life, but his words about snow come to my mind as winter deepens.

In "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening" he describes the steady build up of falling flake, the silence of the night. And the scene brings him both a sense of need and ease, the longing to rest and the press to move on. The poem has a complex rhyme scheme, resolved in the last verse which carries those mixed emotions that snow brings:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Sometimes I have a hard time looking up that poem, because the first line that comes to my mind is, "Snow falling and night falling, fast oh fast." But it's from a different piece called "Desert Places."

In that poem, Frost talks about the way winter obliterates the land. The first stanza descibes that point in snowfall that we see these days: "And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, but a few weeds and stubble showing last." For me, there is a tinge of sadness is the "almost covered", and a kind of defiance in the weeds that still reach above the blanket.

The heaviness of winter is in the poem when he speaks of "all animals are smothered in their lairs." The scene is lonely, but he knows it will get lonelier soon, becoming blank "with no expression, nothing to express." At least on that night, snow drew him into the troubling emptiness that comes to us. The last stanza reads like this:

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Later the same day that I watched snow build up on the yard, I drove through rain. I watched the truck temperature gauge to make sure I was not dealing with ice. I started to miss the snow and wondered when I would get skiing. In this part of Ontario, winter brings us such a mix.

Cathy Hird is a farmer, minister, and writer living near Walters Falls.