Winter

It snowed last night, and the leafless trees look like they’ve been coated with a layer of powdered sugar. As I walk around in the woods, the now is still falling. I didn’t check the temperature, but it’s fairly cold outside. I don’t feel cold, though. I actually feel a little bit overheated in my heavy winter coat, hat, and gloves.

I haven’t encountered any animals today. I think I hear a bird chirping somewhere, but I can’t see it. I didn’t think most birds stuck around southwestern Pennsylvania in the winter, with the cold and the snow and everything. I wonder where the turkeys are. I guess their feathers keep them warm in this chilly weather.

Everything seems very still and quiet. It’s difficult to find much color outside amongst all the white. With the snow still falling, even the sky looks white. It’s the perfect backdrop with Thanksgiving and the holidays right around the corner. Being in the woods behind my house is a stark contrast to walking along the street. The snow there has already begun to turn into slush. The pure white has been tarnished with black and brown dirt from cars driving by, and from the salt trucks put on the roads to make them passable.

The contrast between the way snow looks in the woods, a place that is (as far as I know) untouched by humans and the road that my house is on makes me think about our relationship with nature. I know that we can’t just let snow pile up on roads, but it seems strange to me that as humans we have the ability to completely change the way landscape and nature looks with fairly little effort.

This idea, of course, goes far beyond snow removal. The way we develop and change land is really interesting to me. We cut down trees to make strip malls. We tunnel through mountains to make highways. I wonder about the history of this concept of development, how we first started altering the land to make room for man-made things. What if, instead of destroying woods, we built buildings around or even within the woods? I don’t know how practical that would be, but I think it would be kind of fun to go shopping at Target and take a short walk through the woods on your way to your car. I wonder if in the future buildings will be more immersed in nature rather than separate from it.