December 25, Third Age 3020

I watch the snow and do not wonder

            I watched snow paint the Yuletide white today.  It was a gentle snow, in keeping with the mild, clement weather that this blessed year has brought to the Shire.  I stood outside the door of Bag End, staring upward into the silver-white sky and watching the soft white dots drift to the ground, swift but light and silent save for the whispering hush of their almost imperceptible impact on the bare branches of trees.  The snow rested on the tops of the branches as though some great painter had carefully lined their sinuous gray-silver forms in white.  Some of the snowflakes were large enough that I could even make out their intricate crystalline star-like forms.  When the blanket of white on the ground folded and crunched beneath my feet, the edges glittered in the muted light.  The Blue Mountains in the distance were great ethereal shapes wreathed and veiled in pale gray mist.  The world was luminous with silver, gray, and white, soft and hushed and sparkling.  It should have been a revelation.  I should have watched the snow's light, graceful, whirling dance with awe and wonder, as I watched that first rain in Minas Tirith, exulting in the silver sky and the song of the water.

            But I didn't.  I knew that it was beautiful, but I couldn't quite feel it.  I felt too tired, and that odd empty feeling was in my stomach again.  It makes me miss the half of me that died; he would have stuck out his tongue to catch the snowflakes like Rosie did, giggling, when she followed me outside into the snow to tell me to put a coat on under that cloak.  But who I was a year and a half ago was still swept up in the joy and wonder of having been reborn.  Now that has begun to fade, just as the awe of the star-host wanes when we see it every night of our lives, as I wrote that Spring.  The simple and glorious sights of nature are slowly being drained of their novelty, as I feared.  I hoped I would learn how to live again, not forget!  I hope now that this loss of a child's wonder means only that my normal life is resuming, that, save for being more solemn and weighted with grimmer memories, I am returning to the life I once knew.  Or perhaps I am simply growing old.  I hope it is nothing more.

            I think, though, that the sunset and the stars still kindle some awe in me.  I will truly be afraid when they are no longer magnificent.