When the snow is falling thick and fast, the flakes nearest you seem to be driving straight to the ground, while the more distant seem to float in the air in a quivering bank, like feathers, or like birds at play, and not as if sent on any errand. So, at a little distance, all the works of Nature proceed with sport and frolic.

Today on the way home, it snows. Big, soft caressing flakes fall onto our skin like cold moths; the air fills with feathers.

Night falls fast.
Today is in the past.

Blown from the dark hill hither to my door
Three flakes, then four
Arrive, then many more.

[They were flying at incredible speed. I cannot hazard a guess as to what they were. My inquiries at Yakima last night brought only blank stares, but I spoke today with a man from Ukiah, south of here, who said he had seen similar objects over the mountains near Ukiah yesterday.] It seems impossible, but there it is.

Scattered... over the breasts of the surrounding mountains there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes... or cloud, hovering in the gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. ...[I]t seemed almost as if mortal man might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with sky... The great hills played a concert among themselves, each constituting a strain of airy sweetness.

The universe now appeared to me as a void wherein floated rare flakes of snow, each flake a universe.

A thousand trills and quivering sounds In airy circles o'er us fly, Till, wafted by a gentle breeze, They faint and languish by degrees, And at a distance die.

As far as white Aurora's dews are sprinkled through the air.

They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars,
Like petals from a rose,
When suddenly across the lune
A wind with fingers goes.

They perished in the seamless grass,
No eye could find the place;
But God on his repealless list
Can summon every face

Flakes of white fall thru the trees and onto the road, catching on our clothes and hair. It's a silent fall and it's weird how it makes everything else seem quiet, too, like it's trying to tell you a secret, a terrible, terrible secret.

And one of those plants, yellow and full of milky juice in pale stems, now puffed up with air, discharged only air from its hollow shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by the breeze and softly pervading the azure silence.

Some things that fly there be, — Birds, hours, the bumble-bee:

The leaves were still on the trees but were becoming dry, perched like birds ready to fly off.

As I watch, the sky fills with clouds of snow feathers from every kind of bird there ever was and even some that only exist in the imagination, like the bluebirds that fly over the rainbow.