By Audrey Hackett

The snow started thoughtfully. Just a few flakes wandering the vast latitudes. Then the wind picked up, swelling the snow, and herding it from west to east, slantwise.

I was outside in it, wandering the land, like those early flakes. Experiencing the shift in weather. When does the thought of snow become the reality of snow? The snow of snow? It’s a hard moment to catch. Before I knew it, the few flakes were the many. I was outside — and inside the palace of weather, the house of snow.

I stopped, and stooped, to observe bright orange calendulas, still blooming by the barn. Agraria educator Celia Montemurri had pointed them out to me earlier that day. In a landscape tinted gray and brown, the calendulas’ Day-Glo perfection seemed miraculous. On the other side of the barn, facilities team members David Brown and Matthew Salazar had just finished clearing honeysuckle from a concrete berm. Matthew’s jacket and David’s cap were calendula orange, I noticed — more bright spots, punctuating and harmonizing the land.

I wandered on. Everything was slowed-down and in motion. How does snow do it? It just does it, uniting ceaseless movement and magical suspension. Then I realized that walking itself, this activity of legs and arms and heart and spirit, also offers the experience of dynamic, rhythmic, muscle-and-flow … stillness.

A field away, across the re-meandered creek, was a smudge of a figure in a flannel shirt. A “stuffed shirt,” you could say, though this one was anything but uptight. Casual, whimsical, buddies with everybody, draping his arms over the shoulders of the sky. A scarecrow from the Fall Festival, scaring nobody, certainly not crows.

And yet, seeing a scarecrow in three out of four directions, I felt a sense of comfort in their gentle guardianship of the land. They loved it here — what else could those outflung arms mean? — and they showed their love with a touching constancy. Steady at their posts, swirled in snow, the guardians were becoming ghostly. But not erased.

I turned north, then west. Followed the outer loop of Cherry Lane. Stopped, and stood on tiptoe, to examine a shaggy lip of moss on an Osage orange branch. That unapologetic green. Only the Osage orange fruits themselves could match it.

Now I tacked east. The barn, which had been out of my sight, suddenly came into view. More ship than barn, it seemed to prow delicately into the snow. It wasn’t really moving, was it? The air was gray. The trees were spectral. Here and there, silvery stalks of Queen Anne’s lace poked up, the remnant flowerheads like clumps of botanical snowflakes. Intricate, unmelting.

Snow fell in flocks and waves. Time to return to the Farmhouse. To leave the snow to the snow; to bring my wandering indoors. To bring it inside. To bring it to this blog, where experience is re-meandered by memory and reflection. And where the land — which we seek to steward and which at every turn stewards us — shimmers in pixels and light.

*Audrey Hackett is associate editor of Agraria Journal.

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