Wouldn’t it be nice to come and go like gentle snow? Not the hard, wind-driven kind, but the soft kind … the kind that’s nice to kids and dogs. The kind of snow that builds up slowly on the porch railing until it is about six inches deep and bereft of bird tracks.

Then we can scoop some into big cups and pour some syrup or honey on it and once again taste our way back to childhood. We can do it even when our beards are as gray as mine is these days.

I’m told a lot of folks hate seeing those black and gray clouds moving in. For them, it means a cessation of warmth, a lack of green. It means the swimming hole down on Lewis Creek will belong to the muskrats and the huge trout we call The Lunker. For a few months, anyway.

But children have a grand time in gentle snow. It’s the time of snowmen, and snowball fights, of sliding down the hill on your sled. We’ll go down a steeper hill this year so we can be really fast. It gets dark early these days, of course, but somehow that’s not really a problem. Through the vagaries of the mysterious onset of winter, we discover that darkness shuts down our outdoor fun at about the same time Mom has supper ready. It’s a blending of times. It’s a magical mix that makes us jump out of bed each morning to see if there’s new snow outside. We can handle it, you know. We don’t even talk about it. Somehow that would be profaning the experience.

Because soft, gentle snow tucks us in for the winter and makes us feel loved. It is a gift … just for us.

It’s magic.