Spring Snow Surprises

              I awoke this morning to a beautiful snowfall whitening the world outside my window. Snow had been predicted at 5000 feet, but here I am at 2600 feet, surprised and delighted at this last gasp of winter.

           However, it hasn’t made me recite the Lord’s Prayer, as another mid-April snowfall did, in 2007. I was in graduate school then, and I was driving across the mountains to Lincoln City, on the Oregon coast, to give a lecture for the AAUW. As bizarre as it was to be making a slow and treacherous way through a snowstorm in April, it was equally bizarre, to me, to be reciting the Lord’s Prayer as I did. My professor in Old English had given his students an assignment to memorize the Lord’s Prayer in 10th century English. He wanted us to learn to pronounce Old English with the inflections and rhythms of native speakers, as though Old English were still the living language it once was, with all the beauty of its intonations and vocabulary. Memorizing the Lord’s Prayer, with its gracious prose, he thought, was a good place to begin.

            The Lord's will, which I had asked to be done as I drove over the snowy hills, must have been that I arrive safely at my destination, but not necessarily that I arrive on time. I was supposed to be at the meeting place at 6:00 for dinner, but the program chair had estimated I would begin my talk around 7:15, so it wouldn't matter if I were a bit late, or so I told myself as I watched the minutes click by faster than the miles. Later and later – past 6:00, past 6:15, past 6:30, 6:35, 6:45, 6:50. Finally, at 7:05, I walked into the meeting. People were so relieved to see me they broke into applause. With that sympathetic an audience, my talk went well.

             I stayed the night with my host that night and awoke the next morning to a thicker snowfall and three inches of accumulation. I left early, anxious about treacherous roads and about arriving in time to teach at Rogue Community College, but not so anxious about the roads that I couldn't enjoy the beauty through which I was driving and not so anxious about the time that I couldn't stop at a viewpoint to stand in the snowfall and watch the ocean foam white onto the beach. With the rocks and seaside vegetation also white with snow and a white sky hulking overhead, I was looking on as monochrome a landscape as I have ever seen. But the roads were as dangerous as before and the hills as steep, and, again, as I drove, the Lord's Prayer rose to my lips:

            Fæder ure, thu the eart on heofunum. 

            Si thin nama gehalgod. 

           Gewurthe thin wylla on eaorthan 

           swa swa on heofunum. 

            Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf sylla us to dæg. 

            And forgyf us ure gyltas 

            swa swa we forgyfath urum gyltendum. 

            And ne læth thu us on costnunge, 

            ac alys us of yfele. 

            Sothlice.