It's starting to snow...

I look up from the book of writing, to see light specks starting to fall. So I dash up the wooden stairs to the living room to wake up Maca, the ancient guardian of this home. I bring her down to the basement and pull on my furry black 'Airwalk' boots and my knee-length coat from Leeds and open the door to the crisp 3pm cold.

Eyes on boots, down the well-trodden path to the barn and the curious earth shapes where cars once sat. Crunch crunch crunch. Kiss of cold on one ear. Ice tire tracks form a circle. Maca runs ahead and sniffs the white ground. I get to the barn and hear in the distance a male voice at least thirty feet down behind the perfectly arranged garden where the dog-trainer and her husband live. Two cars in the drive, they're home and also out in the snow. Sounds are magnified. An alien landscape where white takes the place of dark colors and everything glows in a luminous way. Silent, crunchy.

I clap my hands and pat my thighs, motioning to the elderly dog before she hears wind of company and dashes down to find a new friend. The black animal, with her gray face in its curious mix of Boxer and Labrador, lifts her head finally and gazes at me, then comes leaping my way, paws disappearing five inches deep in powdery icing sugar.

We turn together and I follow the second path that leads up the hill. Maca makes her way into virgin territory, an expanse of perfect white that stretches some fifty feet before it is broken up by wild shrubbery. She crouches with shaky back legs and lays a perfect brown dollop on the pristine white, like a Zen joke.

I continue to the house, to a little grassy knoll at the bottom of the porch steps. And the scene reminds me of those photos from up in the mountains when the mist rolls in and submerges a valley. This time it's the snow that has made the ground vanish. A strange sense of vertigo. The Earth's known browns and greens have been replaced with this otherworldly and entirely mystical pure white. A new world for eyes, ears and mind.