Some Winter Days in Iowa | Page 6

sighs, is forgotten even more completely than his Paleolithic ancestors; then, shall some portion of the nebula which now bejewels Andromeda's girdle become evolutionized into a flora and a fauna, a civilization and a spirituality unto which the visions of the wisest seers have never attained? Shall this subtle, evanescent mystery which we call life, which glorifies so many varied forms, be wholly lost, or shall it pass joyfully through the ether to some brighter and better world? Is it true
"That nothing walks with aimless feet; That no one life shall be destroyed, Or cast as rubbish to the void, When God hath made the pile complete?"
We are scarce a step ahead of our forefathers. We do not know.
"Behold, we know not anything; I can but trust that good shall fall At last--far off--at last to all, And every winter change to spring."

II. FEBRUARY IN STORM AND SHINE.
February often opens with a season of cold gray days when stratus clouds, dark and unrelenting as iron, hang across the sky and bitter winds from the northwest blow down the Iowa valleys and over the frost-cracked ridges. In the city the wheels crunch on the scanty snow, and every window is made opaque by the frost. Trains are many hours late, and dense clouds of steam from locomotive funnels condense into vivid whiteness in the wintry air. Nuthatches, woodpeckers, and chickadees join the English sparrows in begging crumbs and scraps around the kitchen door. In the timber the wind rustles shiveringly through the leaves which still cling to some of the oaks. The music of the woods is reduced to a minimum. Life is a serious business for everyone who has to work in order that he may eat; there is little time or spirit for song. In the late forenoon and again in the middle of the afternoon the rattle of bills may be heard on the branches; at other times the woods are almost silent, save for the cracking of the earth as it heaves under the frost, and the boom of the ever thickening ice on the river.
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Then the south wind steals across King Winter's borderland, and the iron clouds begin to relax. But at first there seems little improvement. "The south end of a north wind," say the experienced, and shiver. But wait. Every hour the wind grows warmer and the clouds softer. They come closer to the earth, hanging like a thick curtain across the sky. On the prairie the diameter of the circling horizon seems scarcely three miles long. The clouds hug the far sides of the nearest ridges and shut you in, above and around. It must have been such a day as this when Fitzgerald made that line of the Rubaiyat read: "And this inverted bowl they call the sky." Today the bowl seems very small and dreary.
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By and by a snowflake falls, then a few others, soft as the spray of the thistle in the early days of October. Gently as the fairy balloons of the dandelion they float through the air and rest upon the withered leaves of the white oaks. Soon they come faster, and now the forest-crowned ridge half a mile away which was in plain sight a minute ago is screened from view by the fast falling white curtain.
"He giveth snow like wool." Very beautiful is this snow as it softens the rugged, corky limbs of the mossy cup oaks. It is not like the hard, granular snow which stung your face like sand when you were out in the storm a month ago, when the trumpets of the sky were doing a fanfare, the wind raged from the northwest, the top of a tall black cherry snapped like a shipmast and crashed through the forest rigging to the white deck below, while the gnarled limbs of the big elms looked like the muscles of giants wrestling with the storm king. This storm to-day is not "announced by all the trumpets of the sky." It comes softly as the breath of morning on a May meadow. It silences every sound and curtains you into a rare studio where you may admire its own exceeding beauty. There have not been so many beautiful snow crystals in any storm of the winter. You may see half a dozen different varieties on your coat sleeve with the naked eye, and you pull out a strong lens the better to observe the exceeding beauty of these six pointed stars. They are among Nature's most exquisite forms, and they are shown in bewildering variety. The molecules of snow arrange themselves in crystals of the hexagonal system, every angle exactly sixty degrees. The white color of the snow is caused by a combination of the prismatic colors