The snow is my ally.
I have come to rely upon it.

It arrives without question and settles without inquiry, asking nothing of the ground it presses upon. It does not examine what it covers. It does not recoil. It presses all things equally, smoothing the world until every surface appears calm, until every street looks the same, until even the air consents to forget.

For a time, I am permitted to rest.

What lies beneath the snow is not erased. It is quieted. Blood once spilled does not speak beneath it. It is thinned by weight and time, drawn downward, absorbed into the white until it loses its urgency and its shape. The snow does not cleanse by removing. It cleanses by holding, by pressing, by suffocating what would otherwise insist on being known. I have learned to praise it for this.

There is a kindness in such forgetting.
The ground closes itself and sleeps. Footsteps vanish as soon as they are made. Stains soften. Edges blur. Histories lose their sharpness. I move more carefully then. I lower my voice. Winter makes accomplices of us all, but I accept its terms more readily than most. It grants me a silence I could never manufacture on my own.

But the mercy is never meant to last.

The snow cannot remain without undoing the very world it shelters. What preserves by restraint would destroy by permanence. Roofs would bow. Roots would rot. The covering that protects must retreat, and so it does—not in judgment, not in outrage, but because it must. When the thaw comes, it does not reveal. It dissolves.

The earth drinks deeply.
What the snow absorbed, the soil accepts. Water carries everything with it—iron, memory, consequence—pulling it down and spreading it out until it becomes nourishment. Nothing is rejected. Nothing is purified. Everything is reused. Growth rises from what came before, no matter how it arrived there. I understand this better than most.

There are moments, watching the snow perform its quiet labor, when I wish it could remain as the blood of Christ is said to remain—sufficient, enduring, capable of cleansing the world beyond a single season. If only the covering could be permanent. If only the white could press long enough to smother every cruelty, every practiced sin, including my own. But the snow is not salvation. It is delay. It offers silence, not absolution, and silence cannot endure.

Spring is often mistaken for redemption.
Warmth returns. Windows open. Voices rise. The ground softens and breaks apart, and with it, so do the restraints winter imposed. What was quieted stirs. What was muted resumes its voice. Growth returns, eager and indiscriminate, fed by what the earth was given. I do not mistake this for forgiveness. I recognize it as invitation.

What troubles others does not trouble me.
The earth does not recoil from what it has taken in. It transforms it. Violence becomes condition. Cruelty becomes fertilizer. The green shoots rise without accusation. They never ask what nourished them. Neither do I.

I do not blame the snow when it retreats.
It performs its task faithfully, year after year, pressing down upon the world until silence is possible again. It covers because it must. It leaves because it must. The failure is not nature’s. It is human. We mistake concealment for cleansing and respite for change. I have never made that mistake.

The snow will return. It always does.
It will fall again upon the streets and fields, smoothing their surfaces, muting their histories, offering a necessary covering. For a season, the ground will forgive what I have given it. And when that forgiveness thaws, when the earth accepts its due and growth resumes, I will understand the signal.

As I always have.