Maple Tree Shadows on the Moonlit lawn

On Tuesday afternoon, sometime after lunch, enormous flakes of snow suddenly started coming down. Within a short time, the trees and patches of grass were covered in white. About an hour later, our nandina shrubs had been pushed almost to the ground under the remarkable weight of the snow. By the beginning of the evening, the clouds had started to disappear, revealing a bright half-moon overhead. The shadows cast by the silver maple trees appeared crisp and unmistakable across the front lawn.

This luminous scene, with the snow glowing beneath the moon and the trees creating dark patterns across the landscape, remains one of my favorite views I have ever experienced, anywhere. I have written about it before, including in a 2014 post about the sight of moonlight shining across snow. It is undoubtedly one of the things I cherish most about living in our home.

The sight also brings back memories of the very first winter we lived here. Our daughter, who is now twenty-one, was only one year old at the time. I spent countless evenings sitting in a rocking chair with my baby in my arms, watching the snow outside. The winter of 2000 brought an especially large amount of snowfall, while our daughter seemed determined to resist sleep for as long as possible.

Getting her to settle down involved plenty of rocking, cuddling, and nursing. One night, after finally getting her to fall asleep, I lifted my eyes from her face and looked through the window. There, across the lawn, the trees had formed deep blue shadows that stood out with incredible clarity against the snow. I was stunned.

It was exactly the sort of scene I might have expected to see in a winter painting by Maxfield Parrish, but I had never imagined that something so beautiful could appear right outside my own front door.

At first, I believed there was no way such a scene could be preserved in a photograph. Still, when Tuesday night arrived, I decided that it was worth attempting to capture it with my camera.

The photographs cannot completely reproduce the enchantment of seeing the scene in person, but they do offer a glimpse of what the moonlit snow and shadows looked like that night.

Yesterday afternoon, my daughter and I were outside trying to break through the thick layer of ice covering the walkway behind our house. For a moment, I felt discouraged as I thought about how much of winter still remained ahead of us.

Then I remembered the extraordinary sight of the moon casting tree shadows across the snowy lawn. The February Snow Moon will be arriving soon, and I hope it proves worthy of its name.