I love the first snow of the year.
I especially like it when the snow has fallen overnight, deep and thick enough to cover the grass and the asphalt and to soften the shapes of outdoor furniture and cars parked on the street.
It makes everything look different, clean, new.
It is, as Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote in “Anne of Green Gables,” “a new day, without any mistakes in it yet.”
It doesn’t last, of course. Within an hour or two, the snow on the street has been churned into slush, and with a school directly behind our house, we’ve learned that the sidewalks must be cleared before the kids arrive and the snow gets packed down.
Best to be prepared with snow shovels and salt before that snow falls.
But before pulling out the shovels, I like to take time to just look around, because for a brief moment, it looks like the whole world has changed.
That’s not really wrong; the world has changed with the first snow. The change in the weather signals the constantly changing seasons; even when it warms up a few days after the snow, once it has fallen, we know that we are closer to winter than summer.
We know that change is coming, and that the world is moving on. Nothing is as constant as change, the philosopher Heraclitus said, and that applies to everything: weather, seasons, children growing up, people being born and people dying.
Nothing ever stays the same, for good and ill. The snow melts and becomes slush and freezes into ice before thawing again. The trees sprout buds, which unfurl into green leaves, which turn yellow and scarlet and brown and fall to the ground.
And yet, we humans have a hard time with change. We have a hard time when something we love changes for the worse, of course, but we also have a hard time when a change is good and necessary. “Better the devil you know,” we say, because even good changes call on us to adapt, and every change is a loss, even if only a loss of our habitual ways of doing things.
Think of about the ways Jesus’ call changed the lives of his apostles and disciples, the changes to how they lived their daily lives, the changes that preceded the huge changes in salvation history, changes to the whole known universe. Do you think those first apostles ever missed the simplicity of fishing for a living?
It’s on us to embrace the changes we can, and if we can’t embrace them, accept them, all the while preparing ourselves for the changes to come. Because changes will come, whether we are ready for them or not.
Kind of like the first snow of the season.