Minstrel Weather

THOUGH January has days that dress in saffron for their going, and noons

of yellow light, foretelling crocuses, the month is yet not altogether

friendly. The year is moving now toward its most unpitying season. Nights

that came on kindly may turn the meadows to iron, tear off the last faithful

leaves from oaks, drive thick clouds across the moon, to end in a violent

dawn. January holds gentle weather in one hand and blizzards in the other,

and what a blizzard can be only dwellers on prairies or among the

mountains know. Snow gone mad, its legions rushing across the land with

daggers drawn, furious, bearing no malice, but certainly no compassion,

and overwhelming all creatures abroad: bewildered flocks, birds half

frozen on their twigs, cattle unwisely left on shelterless ranges, and people

who lose the way long before animals give up. Snow hardly seems made of

fairy stars and flowers when its full terror sweeps Northern valleys or the

interminable solitudes of the plains. The gale so armed for attack owns

something of the wicked intention which Conrad says that sailors often

perceive in a storm at sea. The rider pursued by a blizzard may feel, like

the tossed mariner, that ¿these elemental forces are coming at him with a

purpose, with an unbridled cruelty which means to sweep the whole

precious world away by the simple and appalling act of taking his life.¿