It’s fifteen degrees outside and with windchill, it feels like -1. About 3 inches of snow fell during the night and even the interstates were shut down in this part of the world.

Earlier this morning, I got to make another snow angel. When you are edging towards 60 and have had hip replacement surgery, you know better than to assume there are endless opportunities to do something that tickles you half to death. You make that snow angel now, the best you can.

I tromped through the snow in my flowered Tractor Supply wellies to check on my chicken girls and barn cats. Lifting the roof of the chicken coop, so heavy with snow, was scary—we’ve never had it so cold around here with chickens. Everyone is doing well.

I just stood out there, wanting to take it all in, to extract every ounce of wonder and joy from a dawn like this even if the wind felt like it was shredding my ears and my nose to pieces.

And I talked my sweet husband into doing what we weren’t supposed to do: we got in his 4WD pickup truck and went down to Lowndesboro so I could take some pictures and assess the likelihood of being able to go to work today (NOT).

The quiet of snow. The gentleness of a morning too complicated to allow me to go to work. The rock solid truth, however brief and dimly understood, of my husband, my sweet dog Daisy, and my silly one, Mo-licious, all of us jostling and crowded into the front seats of a pickup truck in January, in Lowndes County, on the back end of a snowstorm.