Bare Footprints in the Snow

The last of our winter market events are done; our season was rather truncated, as the earlier markets proved not as profitable as hoped, and one – for which we had great hopes – filled up with other vendors before we could send payment. And what profits we did gain were dented by a computer melt-down on my part, and the necessity of purchasing a new tire for the Montero on Blondie’s. Even though the economy is supposed to be improving, you couldn’t prove it by the small merchants doing the mobile weekly markets this last quarter. And I am coming down with a horrific cold, and Blondie managed to injure her foot last Friday morning, trying to take a picture of the snow-covered field behind our house … yes, it snowed, seriously in San Antonio last week, much to everyone’s surprise. We were expecting a cold spell overnight, and Thursday afternoon delivered cold-blustery-rainy-water-sodden kind of weather, of a degree that made us grateful to retreat to a warm house, eat supper from a tray in front of the television – and then suddenly there was a horrific ‘whoomp’ sound from outside, and all the lights and the TV went off.

Yeah, power outage. Blondie assumed at once that someone had skidded through the T-intersection at the front of our house and piled into either the light standard, or the tree in the front yard. But no – “It’s snowing!”

Real snow – fat, fluffy flakes of white snow, falling as thick as they ever did on the night of a full moon in Utah, where we lived in the early 1990s. That’s one of those snow-falls where the clouds, the snow falling, and the snow fallen combine to reflect the light and make everything – if not as bright as noon, then at least as bright as twilight. I’m told that in Russia this phenomenon is called a “White Night.” The trees were laden with fluffy white snowflakes, the ground below thickly covered … it was beautiful, it really was. It doesn’t snow in San Antonio oftener than every thirty years or so, and this was real snow! We even took of our shoes and socks, and did what we did in Utah for the first heavy snow-fall of the year, which was to run barefoot through it, barefoot in our front and backyard through the fresh-fallen fluffy snow.

Didn’t last beyond midday the next day, of course – it didn’t even stay cold enough to harm any of the plants, even the blooming Christmas cactus. But it was beautiful, and a bountiful gift of the season. And best of all, it didn’t last long enough to do any real harm to the plants in the garden, which a sudden, rock-hard freeze would have done.