If weather were a religion, snow would be the rapture, taking you suddenly to a new place. It etches every small nothing into a something, and then slowly fades the overall something into nothing, pixel by pixel. It hushes the usual and issues every sound from a new palette. It is the original white noise. Before the snow I had been watching how the ground freezes. It's not like ice cubes or the surface of the lake. It freezes vertically in long thin ice crystals whose ends stick up out of the soil and crunch when you walk on them. Each capillary forms a crystal and is separated from others by a few grains of dirt. Up close it looks like a miniature city of skyscrapers or a 3D bar graph made of crystal. Cats don't seem to catch on that snow is an expected seasonal thing; each year they are incredulous and miffed. Xena has morphed into her winter size; her nicknames now include R19 and The Hindenberg. Dexter looks like Sean Penn in a little tiger suit cursing himself for agreeing to make a movie in Siberia.

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