The sky falls into beauty.

Oh, love, wherever you are, if it was snowing by you tonight (as my grandmother might have said), then I hope the snow stopped you and made in you that litany of all the things everyone's said before but we get to say anew when the weather takes this turn:

Listen to the quieted streets. Do you hear how silent they've gotten? How we have all been muffled and hushed? Oh, look at the glitter, the air all filled with glister. What glimmers like this particular snow? Fish scales? Snowglobe glitter? Mica flakes? Fish food in a tank. Confetti for a parade. Salt into soup. Powdered sugar over anything and everything. White like that. But not powdered: flaked, spotted, refracting the lamplight every which way. Shavings of cheese. Shavings of soap, if soap were diaphanous. Move your eyes even a tiny bit and the ground twinkles into motion: the ground begins to shimmer, to wink tiny lights your way. Put that camera away: how are you going to catch those gleams when it's your own motion that makes them move? Watch your step--and not just so as not to slip. This layering ground, this falling sky: they're the best show you'll see all night. Keep looking. Don't make any sudden moves. Like sand through the hourglass, so falls the snow of our lives. In the morning the world will be different all over, blanked once more. If the wind picks back up, we'll be looking at the bottom of a sea again, all those ridges and hollows and hills, all that fragility of surface, all that unexpected malleability.

Those flakes in the lamplight: see them hang and wander, drift sideways and then fall. Laugh under your breath. Laugh to the low muffled voices that pass you in the night.

Slip away while you remember. Drowse, drowse. Fall to stillness and quiet, lighter than the bright snow, and safer, warmer, more lasting. Quiet, quiet. Rest in whatever lightness is by you.