MARCH SNOW

Monica enjoying the snow at the Peoples

Park in Limerick this morning (Irish Times)

SLIP-SLIDING AWAY !

This morning I awoke to a thoroughly changed landscape as overnight the terrain had been gently sprinkled with a fall of snow. Yes snow in March, doesn’t sound right, I thought March was all about showers and gusts though I’m not complaining as I am a bit of a ‘snow head’(as my nearest and dearest will surely attest). What is it about the powdery power of snowfall that sets the heart racing and brings out the child in us, that bewitches adult men and women into snow-ball throwing, snowmen-building loons ? Maybe it’s the surreal almost moon-walk quality of the crunchy stuff underfoot, or the fact that our sometimes drab urban surroundings have been painted white and bright and glistening. The more I go on I realise this is the Christmas blog I never got to write, so you in no-snow-at-the-mo land will have to indulge me in my post Advent glee at this delayed gift from the heavens. Every garden I passed today seemed to be sporting their very latest cheery tenant , a black hatted, carrot-nosed, full figured man of snow dressed in fetching white buttoned up by a fistful of small stones ! Maybe such a simple act of Nature may lift our recessionary gloom even for a day or two as we realise that we live in a beautiful world, and that not everything of worth carries a price tag. To see children play and frolic, kicking up jets of fresh fallen snow and run skidding through the fleecy carpet, cheeks aglow and hearts aflutter is as heartening a scene as you could wish for in these days of mounting job-losses and gathering economic gloom. So let’s bring out the sledge, wrap up well and go out there and slip and slide our way out of recession and into the breath-taking ecstasy of messing about in our out of season Winter wonderland.

Gerard O'Shea