And you need a fire to sit beside while the winter winter weaves on its cloak

We're getting movie snow right now.

Directors try to describe this snow and fail. Writers know that something happens in snow like this... people meet, or leave, or plot, or struggle, or endure. Cinematographers wake from dreams with these perfect, widely spaced, just the right size flakes drifting immaculately slowly in their mind's eye and know they must find the movie they fit in. Set directors and designers bow their heads into their hands, knowing exactly what they mean and trying to figure out how to fabricate it... how many soap flakes, what kind of drum, how many holes, how fast to rotate it. Someday thousands of people will talk to each other about that heart-wrenching winter scene and never know how many artistic hearts burned to create it.

Perhaps some Microsoft engineer was lucky enough to be making a snow angel on a night with this snow. He looked up and the Starfield Simulation screensaver wouldn't leave him until it worked. (OK, probably not. Probably he was a Star Wars geek. But perhaps.)

Every now and then, God (or Nature or the Big Giant Head, if you prefer) just knocks one of these out on a lark, sharing it with those lucky enough to look out the window and stop for a moment.

And now the flakes are larger, and falling faster, and there are more of them, and they make the sky more pale, less grey, and they obscure the woods. It's lovely and all. For just a moment, though, it was living on the other side of the screen.