Four days straight it rained, sometimes heavy, sometimes not much more than a mist. Then it slowed, stopped, and the clouds dropped down out of the sky, ethereal grey, covering the world. The snowflakes dropped softly, steadily, big soft chunks of crystalline water, mesmerizing and tranquil, falling on the boughs of trees, the street, the fields. Everything that isn’t snow looks dark and flat, as though the luminous droplets reduce and dull the substance of the world. Last night the clouds peeled back and revealed a sky shimmering with stars, breathless and still, slumbering and hushed in a white blanket.

The temperature dropped ten degrees in two hours and all the wet snow turned into hard white ice, and the road shimmered silver with ice crystals. The dark isn’t so dark when the earth is covered with ice and snow, reflecting light from the street lamps and windows closed tightly against the cold.