First day of work back from a warm vacation and it's blanketed by a white layer of fluffy snow. It's been the coldest yet for the UK in over a decade, with the heaviest snowfall in around 18 years. In the meantime, the dog came back with a cold and is sneezing, and so am I.
But I'm welcoming the white. For the first time I've been in this part of England, there is a thick 4" of snow on the ground, and more is still falling. Continuously. Previous experiences have always been with a disappointing touch of icing that melts faster than you can say "it's snowing!".
There's something powerfully cathartic about the vision of delicate white flakes indiscriminately covering everything that it falls upon with a smooth, white layer. It speaks of the power of the small in the resilience of one or two flakes persisting at the end of a branch, but also of the power of the collective, in the blanketing force that snow becomes over a blue car, a red berry, the asphalt ground, the green fields. Every colour converted to white in a resistance is futile kind of way.
The snow falls like a meme, an idea. A single flake at first, tossing and flicking in one general direction. And then another, in a slightly different direction. Then another, and another, and before long, a series of snowflakes, some catching on each other as they fall, gaining weight, gaining strength.
The half-pleasure, half-guilt of leaving footprints in the snow where no foot had trod before is soon forgiven as the new snow delicately dab away at the traces of my weight upon the white. No postman or milkman has walked today up the driveway to leave a set of heavy shoeprints upon the ground. No one will disturb the pristine levelling of the ground today, I am willing the snow to disappear as softly as it came, in the shade of a tree or a roof.
If colours mean something, and white often means purity, cleanliness, sometimes death or defeat... if only for the snow scene, white must surely to me mean redemption and force.
As colours go, white is the only colour that in nature dominates all other colours, like it or not. The only colour that can say, "Well, be whatever colour you want to be, but when it's my time, I will surpass you, exceed you, blank you out and become the colour that you will wear, regardless of the colour you are inside." Royalty may wear yellow to be like the sun, and purple to be of noble birth. In my world, royalty will wear white - the all encompassing, all dominating colour. It is the unassuming, yet celebratory colour, the colour that says "in my time I will colour everything else across the world with my shade". And I think, quite possibly, because of the prevalence of snow and cloud, it is the single most frequently occurring colour in nature.
