Moonlight on Snow

Comes a time each winter when the air changes, even night air. From hard, icy, nose-tingling stuff, it becomes suddenly breathable, turns into something different, cool, refreshing, fill-your-lungs, nearly spring air. We are there. That is why, on nights like this, I walk. I want to see, just once more, the moon on snow.

Soon enough, the snow will go. Oh, we might get a storm or two in late April. It has happened. But those are last of it, oversized flakes, clunky clusters struggling to stay crystalized. They drift from somewhere, a farewell gift, here and gone.

We are there, in that pre-season, the turning time of year. That is why I walk. Out there, seeing the full moon on those last patches of snow, my heart leaps and mourns, half fields in bluish light, daily nibbled to nothing. I ponder it and pray.

What did Robert Frost say? Glad, as often he was, for the warmth of spring, he wrote a simple poem –“A Prayer in Spring” – about treasuring the moment.

“Oh, give us pleasure in the flowers today;
And give us not to think so far away
As the uncertain harvest; keep us here
All simply in the springing of the year.”

But I walk in a season before that one, before purple crocuses and yellow daffodils, before spring’s warmth, life and love return, things that flutter, chirp and sting are born and find their wing. I walk when owls still fluff against the cold, wise and old.

I walk and walk and watch that glistening snow, the wordless way a bright moon finds the old snow, gently comes to stay, helping me see how precious is each day.

And Frost talked about that too, how what is old makes room, it must, for what is new. He wrote another verse, not much, enough. He called it “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” and it goes this way.

“Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down today.
Nothing gold can stay.”

Poignant and obviously true, it still misses what I feel. It is close, but not quite, not genuine moonlight, billions of lumens dancing on what is left of my winter white.

I guess the reason seasons strike me as important, their turning especially so, is the people I love, like turning tides, change imperceptibly; we all, you know, are snow. 

Perhaps the best poem – and Frost wrote so many – to capture the beauty, joy, and distant sound of voices loved yet heard no more … is “The Onset.” In this poem, Frost expresses what is true and real, what this time of year I tend to feel.

The poem is longer than a verse, but the part that sticks with me is this. People are precious, just like melting snow, flowers in spring that pop and bloom and grow.

“I know that winter death has never tried
The earth but it has failed: the snow may heap
In long storms an undrifted four feet deep
As measured against maple, birch, and oak,
It cannot check the peeper’s silver croak;
And I shall see the snow all go down hill
In water of a slender April rill …
Nothing will be left white but here a birch,
And there a clump of houses with a church.

So, about my evening walks? They tell me only this. Anticipate flowers; they are joy. But pause as you go, to marvel at moonlight on the snow. Listen for the owl, fluffing on his perch. Love those around you, in the houses and the church.

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC. Robert Charles has also just released an uplifting new book, “Cherish America: Stories of Courage, Character, and Kindness” (Tower Publishing, 2024).