The sound of snow. Quiet and soft, it seems like something that is so powerful would make a much larger sound. Its falling now, the snow, and has been for several hours. It bites you know… snow. It’s a tiny bite sometimes and others it’s a soul sucking, life-draining moment like the bite any vampire of fiction ever delivered to its victim. But then the heat from your skin transfers to the tiny crystal that will never exist again in nature and returns it to the liquid state it was, but the bite is made nonetheless. Sometimes it’s big bite, like when the snow hits the back of a neck that has just had a trim. Then it makes you shrivel inside a little, and you scowl and rant internally about the foolishness of baring even more skin to the sub-zero temperatures that are surely about to descend and freeze the world around you. Sometimes its small, like the almost-kiss of a flake the has hit the end of your nose. Like a tiny winter faerie has just brushed her wings across your skin in an attempt to get you to notice her. They come in a variety of sizes too, from the tiny infinitesimally small ones that flurry passed on their way to oblivion, to the ones that look like the size of leaves from the trees that are now bare.

You may read and scoff at the idea of a sound of snow, or the bite of its flake but I tell you it’s real. Its deceptive. Easy to underestimate its power. The power to make a child laugh and crush the will of an adult. The power to shut down cities and stop wars. The power to clean the world with its passing. Even the power to kill. Snow. Such a small word, a small sound for such a large force of nature, don’t you think?