The Day that Hell Froze

A contemplation of beauty in a Florida snowstorm

On Monday, January 6th, my oldest had a snow day. Well, more accurately, a snow seventy-five minutes. It was 56 degrees and sunny, but in a far-away land where there is a magical season called “winter” his Earth Science teacher was pummelled by a snowstorm. “Well, Bud,” I said, “that’s one advantage of online classes. Because that’s the only way you will ever get a snow day.” I have never been more happy to be wrong.

Last Tuesday afternoon I stepped outside to take stock of the weather. There is a special kind of cold before the snow clouds roll in when the sky withdraws up into itself and waits. The waiting was over; the weather was about to change. I left for my last-chance run. As I ran, the skies sank. The wind picked up and the temperature dropped. I have run before (and during) tropical storms, but the changing wind to bring in a winter storm? Not here. Not ever.

“I saw one!” my husband shouted from the front lawn. At last, he could identify a discernable snowflake. I poured us each a glass of wine and we stood with our children under the sky, catching snowflakes until the snow turned to ice. It was an impossible dream made real. Grace had fallen from the sky. But the joy was laced with pain; that same day we learned that my father-in-law was hospitalized after a heart attack. A winter storm stood between my husband and his ailing father in a hospital in Dothan. Can there ever be beauty without pain?

No one can accuse us of not having enjoyed the snow. Wanting to soak in every moment before it was gone, we were getting dressed at 6:00 am. But the air remained cold. We walked over to our favorite park then returned after lunch, kids’ kayak in tow to join in snow sledding, Florida style. There were pool floats, boogie boards, and my personal favorite, a plastic laundry basket. If it weren’t for the sadness of time and heart attacks, the beauty of it would have crushed me. It was simply more than a human could bear - too much beauty, too much reality.

T.S. Eliot writes,

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind 
Cannot bear very much reality.

Beauty is the same. It becomes too much. It hurts. We pull away. The issue is not “making an idol of it.” The problem is a metaphysical one.

I wish, in hindsight, that in my Christian formation, there had been a lot less bother about justification and a lot more metaphysics. After all, God is Being. Pure being. Furthermore, He is inseparable from his attributes which would, of course, include beauty. The fullness of his being is also the fullness of beauty. The Psalmist writes,

One thing I have desired of the LORD,
That will I seek:
That I may dwell in the house of the LORD
All the days of my life,
To behold the beauty of the LORD,
And to inquire in His temple.

The problem is not that we desire beauty too much, but too little. We are far too easily pleased.

I would have been well served to have learned much earlier that evil is privation. Evil is not-God. Non-being. And in so far as I, in my fallen state, experience this privation, there will always be a limit to the beauty I can bear. Go, go, go. Too much reality.

After a day of downhill kayaking and hot chocolate and icy snowballs and long treks and deep laughter, the afternoon began to grow tired. It was after four o’clock. My toes were cold and my gloves were wet. Little of the icy snow had melted. There would be, after a fashion, a sequel. As the brilliant sun began to fade the light shone on the oak leaves. It was the winter color of light peculiar to mid-January, hued of gold and peach. I stood frozen. I could neither go nor stay. The beauty hurt too much to take in any more. It hurt just as much to leave. But somebody had to make dinner.

On the second day, we slept in. I let my oldest skip his online classes. We were sure it would be gone by lunchtime. We returned to the park where the upper trail remained untouched by the midday sun. “They don’t understand how snow melts,” I told my husband. Since I lived in Ukraine for three years, I am the household expert on snow. There was much talk of snow as here or not here. But snow melts in tragic patches, mixed and dirty, snow and not-snow. Beauty, too, occurs in tragic patches. It has boundaries it ought not to have where the being of beauty ends and non-beauty begins. In the edges is the suffering, the pain. It is our business what we do with those edges.

“Look!” shouted my daughter. We had found the trilliums already growing along the trail the day before the snow. They were not yet blooming, green sepals protecting the ephemeral wine-dark blooms. “Would they survive the snow?” we wondered. She held out one of her mismatched gloves - in it was a perfect image of a trillium made of ice. In an instant, the image broke in her hand and all that remained was the reality: a tiny little trinity of leaves peeking up through the snow.

On the third day, local schools and my husband’s office were closed once again. The snow was half here, half gone and I had a choice: snow, or not-snow? The reality of beauty appeared to recede. Around the edges, actuality returned: a laundry mountain, lessons abandoned, and an empty refrigerator. We chose snow. And for the third morning, we said, “Well, if we’re going to enjoy it, we had better go now. It will be gone in a few hours.” And we headed outdoors.

During our final round of sledding, the icy decline became slippery and I laughed with delight as my boys slid onto their backsides again and again. “This is the most pure joy I have seen in you at least since your father died, maybe longer,” my husband said. He was right. I don’t remember the last time I laughed so much, so deeply. This was the week that grace fell, my holy Tridium. And in it, I was reminded, if only for a while, of the fullness of being.

Now the thermometer in the shade reads 70 degrees. It all seems more a dream now than a memory. I should be working but I am drawn to return to the path on the hill. I come, I guess, to pay homage to my little icons in the woods. Weather-worn, the little trinities remain. Old buds have passed away, new buds wait covered and silent. The beauty that I longed for receded in tragic patches. The beauty that I did not want remains. I walk in someone else’s greener pastures, someone else’s fantasy. The woods are like a half-broken image in my hand, as I wait among the edges until that day comes when the wine-red blooms emerge for good. No more patches. No more waiting. Only grace.