Wash me and I shall be whiter than snow.
Snow blanketed the world while I watched the miracle from my window. What had been the brown and dry lawn and the black skeletons of an Oklahoma winter landscape became a dazzlingly bright wonderland. The grays of yet another bland uninteresting day became awesome in beauty. The children rushed to find warm socks, stocking caps, and boots. If you dally on a snow day this far south, the snow could vanish while you hunt mittens and search out a sled. I know that sounds great to those living in Northern states with their long cold winter months. Snow gone before noon. They wish.
Ron went out leaving me with a pot of strong coffee to check our two mama cows waiting to deliver their calves. Of course, it seems cows wait until the miserable cold wet days to bring us their babies and that is exactly what happened. Nora had given birth to a pretty black angus calf.
She hadn’t fed it though and the calf was shaking fiercely and she was wet. Her belly empty. She had been born in the center of the open orchard far from any shelter of trees or embankment. Ron carried the calf inside and dried her down with a stack of bath towels. He dried and warmed her with a blow drier until she stood up and threw off a blanket he had wrapped her in. He mixed a bag of colostrum milk and poured it into a calf-sized bottle and fed her as much as she’d take. Then he carried her back to the hay stack where her mama was bawling for her. He laid her in the warm hay and mama tended her.
I named her Hettie Burd after the writer who wrote the popular devotional book Streams in the Desert. Hettie was a mission minded woman who led a world mission society and raised funds for missionaries. She’ll soon be romping in the pasture with the other new calves, Rachel, Amy, Liz and the bull calves. She’ll have a good life here becoming a mother cow herself someday and bringing us more babies born in foul weather no doubt.
Snow piles on fenceposts. Snow caps the mailbox. it surrounds the hen house and blankets the ground. Snow covers the ugliness of a muddy brown winter and makes it wonderful for a bit. It feeds us with a change of perspective.
Every twig holds its trim of white and every branch is lined. Snow falls in great flakes like raindrops onto our cold world and makes everything magical and beautiful.
It covers the hay, last summer’s garden, the forsythia bush, the clothes line, the road and driveway have disappeared and that’s okay. There is no place we want to go. There is no place like home.
Come now let us reason together, saith Jehovah: though your sins be as scarlet; they shall be whiter than snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall be like wool.
Isaiah 1:18 NASB
What’s Good About Home! 
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