Although many seniors are snowbirds, and I love a warm getaway, I’m content to live in Colorado, where we’re treated to a twinkling carpet of frosted fluff from time to time. Perhaps there’s a bit of the school kid hoping for a snow day left in me. Does anyone remember the unusual fall blizzard in October 1997? I opened my front door and was greeted with a glacial glistening wall of white. Three feet fell.

Like the Pevensie children mourning “always winter and never Christmas” in C. S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,” I loathe blustery but never snowy.

It’s the transformative aspect of snow that enchants me. It’s magical. For a day—here, it’s sometimes not even that—the drab scenery sports a showy coat of pristine crystalline drifts. Sometimes it glitters like crushed diamonds—artic bling. On silvery moonlit nights, the landscape is luminous, tinged cobalt. Occasionally we’re treated to powdered pines that surpass stores’ carefully flocked Christmas trees. And Pikes Peak looks even more stunning when it dons a cap of icy white. 

If it snowed overnight, I’m convinced you know upon waking without even peering out the window. Everything is hushed. Traffic sounds muffled, if not nonexistent. I wondered if that was just my own quirky take, but Google revealed, “the sound absorption rating for snow is in between 0.5 to 0.9, which means a few inches of new fallen snow provides an impressive amount of acoustic insulation.” 

Have you heard that the Eskimos have 50 words for snow? There is truth to that, if you consider all the languages in the Eskimo-Aleut family. The same base word has various suffixes attached for long and complicated words describing sleet, flurries, blizzards, etc.—and there’s not just 50, but hundreds of words!

Wilson Bentley of Jericho, Vermont, pioneered photographing snowflakes, like the one shown here, in the 1800s. His photos show intricate, symmetrical six-sided crystals (and a few three-sided) in an astonishing array of delicate designs—no two the same, due to fluctuations in temperature, wind and humidity. Peering through an old microscope, teenaged Bentley tried sketching the frozen flakes to capture and share their elegant allure with others, but he couldn’t keep up before they melted.

Bentley read about a camera with a microscope, and his parents spent their savings on it. It could magnify a tiny crystal from 64 to 3,600 times its actual size. Through trial and error—and working quickly—Bentley figured out what worked to produce his breathtaking photos. He made slideshows, wrote about snow and gave speeches to scholars. When he was 66, his book, “Snow Crystals,” was published—his gift to the world. 

“I found that snowflakes were masters of design,” Bentley said. “No one design was ever repeated. When a snowflake melted… just that much beauty was gone, without leaving any trace behind.” 

Looking at a sparkling expanse of sugary snow, it’s hard to comprehend that it’s comprised of countless tiny, exquisite crystals.

My yard only shows evidence of snowmen, forts, snow angels, snowballs and sledding escapades when my granddaughter is in town, mittened and layered up. Non-skier that I am, my up-close-and-personal snow encounters these days are usually on my sidewalk, holding a shovel. I’d rather not drive in it. When there’s snow, I don’t go. 

But if there’s a dazzling dusting while I’m safely ensconced at home with a fuzzy blanket, warm beverage and fireplace blazing as I watch the feathery flakes fall, let it snow!

Because it’s evanescent. These snowflakes—winter’s frosty fingerprints—are so fascinating, their loveliness so fleeting.