February Snow: the Beginning

As I listens to Faunts' M4 (Part I), sleets are powdering the car park outside my window again. The tiny flakes danced with ever changing paces and directions under the lonely street lamp, like thousands of restless fireflies or falling stars in the milky way as seen on a giddy roller coaster ride. The dreamy music and the unpredictable flakes make familiar sights feel so surreal and alien. This can be most fascinating and meditative. I can watch the unpredictable movements of the white dots in the dark for hours without end.

I do not know what scene will greet me when the sun rises, but tonight, it is apt to reflect on the first day (and night) of such a snowfall in Bristol as it has not been for at least two decades. It was the 4th of February, when the unexpected happened and this was how the car park looked after a day of snowfall.

Walking to uni in a snow storm was quite an experience. It made you wish you were wearing goggles especially when the wind was greeting you face on.

Lots of dogs were out enjoying themselves, yet none of them looked so right compared to a husky in the snow. What a joy to see this wolf-look-alike indeed!

A blanket of white can really changes your perspective of seeing things you see everyday. In hindsight, perhaps experiencing snow in Bristol is far better than to seek snow in any other places. Here, I've seen it through the different seasons and I can make the comparison. The snow added depth, a side and a face of a place you never know.

What interests me a lot after the snow is how the frozen moisture clung to different kinds of foliage. A needle-like leaf, a blade of grass, pebbles on the road, these are the very things that I have always overlooked. But that which concealed them do verily magnified them to me at the same time.

The ice remained in the shadowy side, still unscathed by the sun of a clear morning the following day.

The resilient grass, lowly yet ever green in Bristol, even in the heart of winter, poked their spiny heads and reached for the sky.

A fallen leaf rested tranquilly on the snow, disturbed only by water droplets from the melting ice on branches above.

The snow does much to accentuate the weathered and battered looks of these ancient stones. One can wonder how many winters had the castle saw and how many generations, cycles and seasons had these walls stood.

But unlike the stones laid so many years ago, snow comes and snow goes. It is powerful. It transforms all that it touches, both physically and otherwise. Besides coloring things white, it can change the mood completely. Yet it is only so brief. A few days' sun, a few nights' rain, and it will be gone without a trace.

The grace that washes us clean as snow is wonderfully not so brief. I have seen more snow than these, yet remembered less. But perhaps the brevity of its existence, before its ascension once more is just a common fact of life. It is just the obvious, that we are often oblivious with, given a form that we can't deny. And if one is wise, one will heed the reminder of a phenomena that graces Bristol seldom.