It's perhaps a little-known fact that I hate winter...well, little-known if you're of the dim-witted sort. Let me say it plainly for you: I hate winter. I hate being cold. I hate the mucky mush on the sides of the roads. Because I am female and therefore altogether confusing and nonsensical: the first snow is one of the biggest thrills of my year.

It came yesterday, and it wasn't much of a thrill. I feel a little gypped. It reminded me more of that movie about global warming—The Day After Tomorrow? Hard, bruising rain through the morning, sky black as night...thunder that seemed to quake the office...wind that seemed to force the rain to fall horizontally...and then the snow fall there at the end...just in time for rush hour stupidity.

Yet, this morning, I look at this:



And my breath catches. The land is unsullied, pure and immaculate. This is God's artwork, an appreciation my mother embedded so deeply in my brother and, too, in myself. She would call me in the early evening hours to my bedroom. "Laur? Come and see!" My mother is the only person who's ever shortened my name. It sounds wrong on every other tongue. I would join her at my window, Westward-facing and luminous in twilight. We would be bathed in pinks, peaches and lavenders. The fiery glow painted our skin and transmitted warmth as we stood there and breathed it all in...and in the stillness she would say—and my brother would know what I'm going to say if he was a regular reader—"God paints us a pretty picture." Truly, stop and look. Life will seem richer. Life will be richer.

And with that, I remembered last year's first snowfall, amidst a broken marriage and a dying parent...a dying friend, and I remembered it with a smile. I remember staying with my Mother a lot after Miles left, how dually we leaned on each other, how many times we talked, how warm our conversations were, how silly and joyful they continued to be, truly exemplifying our Miss Mary Sunshine gene. You know, she might have given me the gene that left me missing parts and with extra organs...and, as I learned at Monday's CT Scan, a certain difficulty finding a veins...but she left me with a smile, an ability to see past the shadow and into the light.

I re-read her comment to my simplistic post this morning, and laughed aloud, worrying I would wake Nick. I burrowed into the sofa and enjoyed the view, still sipping my coffee as I did then, and felt inexplicably...happy.