Half an hour northeast of Colville, Washington, on a Sunday in January after you've climbed out of an afternoon-pink-tinted valley and arrived at the house. The snow lays piled three feet high and it's sticky. This you will find out after you've made a snow angel and it won't come out of your hair, or off the socks, sticking out of the tops of your boots.
The snow's under-surface, where it rests on the tin roof has grown a layer of ice at the end of each day of the slightest thawing (this from the warming from within the building), and each day it has slid until it's formed a beautiful fold, like a succulent silk-satin cloth, draping itself over the edge of the roof. It looks mellow, but is hard and harsh when it meets with a tall man's forehead and nose bridge.
And then there are the endless pines heaped with winter goodness, looking so cliche, yet irresistibly beautiful. But nothing compares in beauty to the moment when you stand, after the dog has finally succumbed to its need and tinkled in the snow, making a perfect little hole that looks as if she's just peed a yellow dot, and you become suddenly aware of silence.
You notice it has been years during which you've forgotten the existence of such silence, of the absence of sound, and you wish you could have this always, this sense that the world is a cathedral, awing and immensely blessed.
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