專四晨讀美文：First Snow

First Snow
The first fall of snow is not only an event
but it is a magical event.
You go to bed in one kind of world
and wake up to find yourself in another quite different,
and if this is not enchantment,
then where is it to be found?
The very stealth, the eerie quietness,
of the thing makes it more magical.
If all the snow fell at once in one shattering crash,
awakening us in the middle of the night
the event would be robbed of its wonder.
But it flutters down, soundless,
hour after hour while we are asleep.
Outside the closed curtains of the bedroom
a vast transformation scene is taking place,
just as if a myriad elves and brownies were at work,
and we turn and yawn and stretch
and know nothing about it.
And then, what an extraordinary change it is!
It is as if the house continent.
Even the inside, which has not been touched, seems different,
every room appearing smaller and cosier,
just as if some power were trying to turn it
into a woodcutter's hut or a snug log cabin.
Outside, where the garden was yesterday,
there is now a white and glistening level,
and the village beyond is no longer
your own familiar cluster of roofs
but a village in an old German fairy-tale.
You would not be surprised to learn that all the people there,
the specacled postmistress, the cobbler,
the retired school master, and the rest,
had suffered a change too
and had become queer elvish beings,
purveyors of invisible caps and magic shoes.
You yourselves do not feel
quite the same people you were yesterday.
How could you not when so much has been changed?
There is a curious stir, a little shiver of excitement,
troubling the house, not unlike the feeling there is abroad
when a journey has to be made.
The children, of course, are all excitement
but even the adults hang about
and talk to one another longer than usual
before setting down to the day's work.
Nobody can resist the windows.
It is like being on board a ship.