My walk to the bus stop for my commute to the office commences just after 6:00 in the morning. At this time of the year, it’s still pitch dark and quiet. Typically, I reach the stop before any of my fellow passengers.
The other day I stood there flashed by coming traffic and thinking of something to keep me busy. Normally, I would get busy on a puzzle, but with so little light, it would be bad execrcise for my eyes. The bus was about 10 minutes away usually and that’s plenty of time to kill. Since mid-week, there have been shiny patches of hardened snow on the paths which made my daily walk routine a bit challenging so I made sure to reach the bus stop in plenty of time.
As I stood shivering in the cold, I noticed sparkles in the snow. Little glitters that looked like mini twinkling Christmas lights, only the sparkles didn’t come in many colors. I probably saw the same thing many times over in the past during wintertime, but never really paid attention. The flashy things must have been caused by contact from the light from the overhead pole. They glittered like small diamonds and made the blankets of snow look more interesting than they normally did.
One by one, my fellow passengers came to the stop to take their spot on the bus queue. I stayed glued to my place, with eyes focused on the sparkles. Like a child who just learned a new thing in school, I felt transfixed and amazed at the glowing beauties.
I wanted to tell the two ladies behind me, but they were carrying on an animated conversation in Spanish. How do you say sparkle in that language? Anyway, I decided to keep the matter to myself. No one cared about the snow these days, specially when it had caused so much inconvenience!
Then I remembered walking home the other night on sidewalks with melted snow that had turned to crunchy ice. It was a treacherous trip home on foot. I was thankful for my long umbrella which was used as a convenient cane. When the bus dropped me off at my stop, I almost froze at the sight of a foot high packed ice below the bus door. I must have looked panicked because the nice lady driver told me to “use your umbrella as a cane.” That did the trick! I stuck my umbrella on the ice-packed curb and jumped down that icy pile like a seasoned trooper! Bless that driver’s heart!
Since the snowstorm, I’ve been walking with my long umbrella so I could use it as a crutch. It has helped me negotiate the icy patches without slipping or falling down. Strangely, during my cautious walks home since the snowstorm, I never noticed the sparkles in the snow. Could it be because my mind was winding down from the work day’s stress and didn’t have time to notice the little things? Like everyone else hurrying to get home, I’m usually starving at that time of the day! So even if I went past a real diamond in the snow, chances are, I wouldn’t have noticed it.
In the morning, my mind is fresh and open to appreciating the little things. That might explain why something that glitters in the snow, that normally wouldn’t call my attention, became a precious preoccupation.
The sparkles in the snow consumed me this morning so I took time out to see what those little jewels in those snowy layers were about. This is what I learned from http://www.ask.com/:
Flat snowflakes resting on top of a blanket of snow can, like our bowl of water, act like a mirror, reflecting a portion of the sun's image toward your eye. Each 'sparkle' is an individual crystal reflecting the sun's image. Whether or not we see the sparkle depends on the angle formed between where the sun is, where we are looking and the angle at which the snowflake is resting. If all these conditions are right, occasionally as we walk by a field of snow, we'll see it glitter because of how the sun is being reflected by the different crystals of snow.
Live and learn! Today I learned why the snow sparkles. What a winter blessing!
