It was quite a profoundly amazing night. I suppose there are some of us who are charmed by a mere blanket of white powder, but I think there is something beautiful about a night which is as bright as twilight, where the reflections of any lights are dispersed and brighten the landscape rather evenly. I recall that the Eskimos had a large number of words for snow - and the remarkable difference between the snow tonight and the snow a few days ago is the way it gripped things. This snow was extraordinarily sticky - grabbing and holding on the edges of things and again to itself so long as it remained frozen. The result was that trees became bedecked with white and their branches looked like the veins in a complex, gigantic ice-leaf. The snow did not just rest on top of the branches (which is usual even with very powdery snow) but clumped about every appendage - twig and bough alike.

Granted, the fact that we don't often get snow around here makes me actually care - New Englanders don't share my passion - but then again, this is more than likely due to the fact that a 2-3 foot blanket of snow contains so many different types that you don't get an experience of one sort of snow so much as an experience of a lot of snow that needs to be removed.

Snow adds an extra, exquisite (and perhaps guilty) pleasure it did not once have: jokes about global warming.