Winter White

I went for a drive yesterday - down to the land of turkeys and sheep, to visit my daughter at school. I was a little anxious about going, because there's a lot of snow out there and I didn't know what the roads would be like.
(They're an icy mess in front of my house...)

I made a quick trip to the library to get a book on CD to listen to on the way down. I wanted to kick myself when I discovered that I had gotten there without a pair of glasses!
(This has been happening a lot lately.)
Have you ever tried to choose a book by touch?
Yeah. It doesn't work.

I had to pull each one off the shelf and hope the titles were big enough to see semi-blind. I finally found one I hadn't read by an author that I like, so I checked it out - whether it would have been my first choice or not...

As usual, I worried needlessly. The roads were clear and dry, and it was smoooooth sailing. The only thing near to a problem that I had was that with the snow cover over everything, landmarks were camouflaged and it was a little disorienting.
Until I started coming to the little towns, I wasn't always sure where I was.

It was beautiful though. Miles and miles of sparkling untouched snow.
I love it - like looking at a vast, perfectly frosted cake.

In my younger days, I would have liked nothing better than to plow through every inch of it (or at least as much as possible...)
But these days I'm perfectly content viewing it from the interior of my heated cruising "bubble."

That thought brings a fresh memory to mind...

A few weeks ago, we had the girls here for the kids' weekly date night. It had snowed the whole time as we snuggled in front of cartoon after cartoon, so by the time their parents got here, there was about a foot laying on the ground.

As we sat visiting with the kids, a cold blast told me that the little one (who can't sit still for a minute,) had escaped through the front door.

I ran up the stairs and found her plowing trails through the virgin snow, laughing and giggling as she went.
(Thankfully, she had thought to put on her snow boots first - not a given for this child!)

I so wish I had caught that moment on film - I've played it in my mind a hundred times since.

It was the perfect expression of pure unadulterated JOY.

We ran into my daughter in law's sister as we were shopping for groceries.
I had posted on facebook that I would be in town, but I marveled at the chances that we would be in the same place at the same time - until I thought about it some more...
We would have had to be at Wally World or McDonald's - no other places to hang out down there. :-) Always fun to see her.

I covered all the bases with my daughter and felt good about the trip.
The ride home always feels so much shorter than getting there for some reason.
The sun was just beginning to dip in behind the hills, casting pink and blue shadows across the sparkling snow...

Hard to keep one's eyes on the road.

The rest of the week is mine, but there is laundry to do and calls to make...

Later.
.