There are few things more magical than a snowfall, and few terms more overused to describe it.
Nonetheless, the cliché communicates the outright miracle of slowing a world that refuses to slow itself. As the flakes fall, and the cardinals and Jenny wrens bob back and forth from feeder to trees, I am entranced.
24 hours later, I am so over it.
I have a running dialogue with a very dear friend that begins around the end of November and continues ad nauseam until the daffodil blossoms break.
She maintains that if it’s cold, it should snow.
I maintain that, as the Mid-Atlantic is a region where there is no chance of snow hanging around long-term and insulating the ground against the normal onslaught of frigid temperatures, nor is it a region filled with 9,000 foot peaks topped with cozy skiing lodges for the intrepid, I’m good without the occasional complication and accompanying suburban media freak-out.
This year she started a shared text thread with my equally enthusiastic daughter (for whom she functions as a ‘cool,’ alternate, mom), where they exchange GIFs of pandas rolling down snowy hills, and Will Ferrell nonsense, and frequent screen shots forecasting ‘snow events’ (when did we change this terminology I wonder), and I counter with the Heat Miser shaking his fists at the skies.
My friend’s enthusiasm is childlike and wonderful, and an extension of an enviable personality that searches for merit before fault. Secretly I am ashamed at the contrariness it instantly inspires in me (and which Scott Beuerlein constantly falls over himself to mention). But I am a pragmatic soul, and there are animals to care for, and so many young shrubs and trees that often need tying up or careful, post-event extrication.
Five years ago, a rogue snow storm dumped 24 inches in two days and 18 inches a few days later. It quite literally flattened my new and precious Edgeworthia chrysantha, splitting branches which I had to meticulously excavate and then (successfully) splint with flexible tape.

You know what’s under that drift? My edgeworthia.
My friend was not splinting her edgeworthia. She was sledding.
Throughout several nights I had to trudge down to the vegetable garden to keep cheap and cheerful mini-hoophouses from collapsing under the weight of the snow, wondering if the lettuce and chard was really worth it. In waist-high drifts we dug a tunnel from house to far-off woodyard to feed the furnace to keep us warm.

Those hives are on two foot stands.
My friend is not checking hoophouses. She is not feeding a furnace. The deeper the snow, the happier she is drinking cocoa indoors and watching her Husky frolic like the dog he was born to be.
The year of that record snow was also the year that one of the male guineas had an injured foot and the other male chased his limping, broken figure so relentlessly over icy drifts that even my flint-like heart broke in sympathy.
Catching either one of them was laughably impossible. Instead we watched the Order of All Things unfold in front of us every morning over breakfast and developed hearts even harder than the ones we had started with.
This year I have an injured duck, whose bill is now half a bill thanks to the attentions of a wicked raccoon. Each morning I head down to the duck house with a kettle of boiling water to unfreeze their water trough and a bowl of soupy oatmeal to scoop into my hand and force her to eat much like a French goose heading for foie gras.
I’m not saying that kneeling in duck poo and runny oatmeal with clumps of snow melting in the space between my inner thighs and a squirming bird isn’t invigorating. I’m just saying that there are better ways of being invigorated.
Yes, it is beautiful. There are mornings when my eyes open to rest upon the pink-flushed bark of the young tulip poplars against a hillside of white – and I am sweetly and painfully thankful for this cathedral in the woods. Yes, it is very beautiful.

Jemima the Half-Billed on left, Ping on right.
And to rail against the inconvenience of snow is not to rail against winter. I am no fair-weather gardener, and once I have made the mental shift from the growing season to the ice-times, I willingly, if reluctantly, battle the cold, clothed warmly and gratefully against it each day.
It’s just that the snow makes everything a little more…complicated.
My husband says we live in a place of winter purgatory – forced to endure cold temperatures without the skiable Sierra Nevada mountains of our youth.
Perhaps he is right. Perhaps the snow is an issue for me because most of the time, it isn’t.
Or perhaps the fairly recent lack of little ones taking delight in the occasional snowfall has me reducing something miraculous to a clinical list of pros and cons.
Or maybe it’s just COVID making me an intolerant witch lately.
So what do you say? Snow good? Snow bad? And do avoid shaming me for considering my USDA 6b garden as extreme, or characterizing my piddling flocks and domestic pets as ‘animals’. I recognize that in the scheme of things, this most definitely makes me a snowflake. – MW

Snow or No, my Woodland Garden Green Man remains unfazed.
It’s always magic when it first falls. I wish I could go to sleep to the sight of gently falling snow. But having to dig ourselves out is tough, and strangely, it always seems to happen when we need to do that for some reason. I couldn’t say no snow, but maybe just a little, now and then?
Along the same lines as the “snow event” lingo, I also love the local news and their “Storm Force” weather teams and such. Like they can swoop in and stave off that polar vortex with their giant meteorology laser!
A delightful read! And I am like you, “snow events” are a mixed bag. It seems like the allure of snow begins to dissipate around the age where you are suddenly in charge of shoveling it.
the statue in the first picture is just about how I feel right now
Southern RI used to have lovely snow. Now it comes straight out of the sky as slush – not good for snow shoeing, not good for cross country skiing, terribly heavy for shoveling. Ping! Great name for a duck. I grew up reading the story of Ping.
A friend gave me that book when I got ducklings as I had never read it. A lovely story and it makes me smile when I move the ducks around with a long branch. However, I never whack bottoms. 🙂 – MW
I’m glad for our current snow cover, since it’s hovering around zero today, has been for a week, and will for another week. But I would not mind if we didn’t get any more…
Snow is much better than the ice we have had in SW Indiana these last few years of global weirding…
I have that same gargoyle! He looks like that today also…covered in snow
Half an inch of the lightest icing sugar dusting please, just for the photo opportunities. One inch is ok. 2 inches, I will go for a bracing walk. 3 inches, I may be braced, but briefly. 4 inches, I will stay home. By 4 days I will be fed up with it. I cannot recall 5 inches of the stuff in Somerset for the last 4 years.
Four feet of it and no skiing? No way!
Here in the mountain valleys of Utah we have been getting a few inches here and there with it all melting in between “events”. I’d happily take all the snow you’d like to send this way! Until the end of February anyway, and then I’m over it.
“I’m not saying that kneeling in duck poo and runny oatmeal with clumps of snow melting in the space between my inner thighs isn’t invigorating.” I am dying. Love how this column always captures the zeitgeist
The invigoration continues with more snow and ice on the way this weekend! – MW
After 50+ winters in Maine, I’m over it.
Love Northern Virginia winters. If it snows, it doesn’t last for months and no below zero temps.
It’s not the snow that causes grief. It’s the snew.
I loved your duck care description! In southeastern Tennessee, any snow is celebrated, is usually gone by lunch and only shows up every 3 or 4 years. I consider that a perfect winter!
Amy Grant’s Tender Tennessee Christmas from a thousand years ago springs to mind. Sounds ideal! – MW
Delightful piece of writing!
I’m a snowflake, too – and thoroughly enjoyed this! Also, I can’t IMAGINE your life. Caring for 2 indoor cats is my limit.
Beautifully and humorously written. I especially love the line about “The Order of All Things” unfolding causing one’s hard heart to become harder. As I sit here looking over my green “winter” yard while hoping, wishing, and praying for snow in the Central Sierra just up the road, I read your post with a bit of envy.
Here in Zone 8a Dallas, I look on snowflakes in sheer terror for the many plants that will perish. Over the next few days, temps will drop to lows not experienced here for a 100 years. All I can do is pray that the soil will be warm enough to protect the roots of many many wonderful plants and wait for spring to assess our losses. Ugh!
If you actually do have snow it may be the saving grace for the roots of those plants! Good luck — it’s very worrying. -MW
What l’m sick of is the soggy. NC has had rain or snow just about every day for what seems like weeks. Maybe months. On the rare occasion that the sun shows its face long enough to go outdoors and look around, l have to keep adjusting my stance because my feet sink into the ground. Seriously. And here in the mountains, we have “slope failures”. Stretches of highways just collapse, or mountainsides slide onto the highway. Sometimes people’s houses slide down the mountains. Bridges start to disengage from their banks. The forecast is not encouraging, either…
That sounds pretty rough. My sympathies. -MW
M.,
Yes a well-written article. But you didn’t bite on my “snew” email. Maybe your hubby has kept you up on Dad jokes. Or, your spidy sense told you not to respond.
You were supposed to respond: “What’s snew?” . . .
to which I would have answered: “Not much. What’s new with you?”.
Sigh.
I deeply dislike being invigorated by ‘snow events ‘. Snow should be like summer rain;briefly wonderful and gone by lunchtime!