The numinous and the sentimental season

The snow came late the year I was 12. At least, that’s how I remember it. A few early winter flurries — more gestures at snow than actual precipitation, like the casual handwaving, the quick prestidigitations that magicians do to get the audience in the mood for the bigger tricks to come — were followed by a pair of November storms soon cleared away in the scrape and rumble of the snowplows.

Well into Advent, well into the run-up to Christmas, the lawns in town and the ranchers’ pastures that stretched across the prairie to the east were bare, uncovered in their winter poverty. Naked in their frozen ground, with a few ugly tufts of dead grass and the stubble of unharvested stems. The river hills were yellow-gray.