And Snowflakes Passed Before the Bluff

A few days ago I was driving back from town. Ran into some minor road work (this late in the season?!) and had to stop until the flagger flipped his sign from "stop" to "slow."

For a good minute or more I sat there. Looked up at a high bluff off to one side of the road, a bluff covered with trees. Though now it's all evergreens, or trees empty of leaves. A few birches in the mix, but overall by this time of year a dark background.

And before that background passed a myriad of snowflakes. It was snowing. A myriad of snowflakes, all swirling more or less in the same direction, the same moving pattern, in curling array.

A myriad of snowflakes, a horde, a million-swarm, like the largest and most numerous flock of miniature white birds you ever did see.

So the snowflakes passed before the bluff. I was in awe. Reached down and got my glasses, put them on, and the wondrously manifold and detailed flock of snowflakes, like a million tiny living things, was thrown into even sharper relief before the face of the bluff.

Then the flagger turned his sign to "slow," and I shifted out of park and began to move down the road in the remaining open lane.

Ten thousand migrating snowflakes, and ten thousand times ten thousand! And the snowflakes passed before the bluff. And I was struck speechless.