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Well, it snowed a little bit here last night.  It's cozy to sit in our living room and look outside at the chilliness.  Ahh, I like winter.  I remember when I was a kid, the first snowfall was always so exciting.  For some reason, the first snowfall of the year seems to happen at night, and the feeling of waking up to a world covered with white is somewhat magical.  I love snow days.

The other day I asked my kids to write in their journals about their favourite season.  The majority of them said: I like summer, and fall, and winter, and spring.  I guess they have a point.  How can you pick one favourite season when there are good and bad things about all of them?  Personally, my favourite is fall because if love the eye candy of brilliant yellows contrasted against their dark brown trunks, but then I like winter and summer, too.  And spring is pretty exciting when you look forward the whirring of the cicadas and the rolling green corn fields of summer.  I think that the poet who helped me understand the beauty of the changing seasons is Gerard Manley Hopkins.  He writes about how we can see God's loving faithfulness in the fact that the seasons always change, and how we always know what to expect, and that after the dying and death of fall and winter, there is always the rebirth and life of spring and summer.  Somehow dying is beautiful.  And so it is with life.