Credit: Electron and Confocal Microscopy Laboratory, Agricultural Research Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture
From my unplowed street in New York City last week, two feet of beautiful fluffy white stuff morphed into frustration if you actually needed to leave the house. But secretly snow still reduces me to an 8-year-old child every time I see a few flakes. I grew up in Florida where I rarely saw a few pellets and never made a snowman or snowangels until sometime in college. Nor did I have to shovel the disappointing aftermath, gray ice-slush hunks of industrialism on asphalt.
Snowflakes form six-sided moments of magic that come and then waft away, forcing us to slow down, whether we want to or not.
I’m not the only one who got swept away with the snow this week.
- Wired highlighted some amazing up-close and personal images of snowflakes.
- In covering the same pictures, MSNBC linked back 10 years to several fun stanzas marveling at frozen water in all its forms.
- And in a New Yorker commentary that sounds more like a premonition than the aftermath of the storm in New York, Adam Gopnik has his own poetic words about flakes. He writes:
For the final truth about snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall—that, buffeted by wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever more strange and complex patterns, until, at last, like us, they touch earth. Then, like us, they melt.
