You know what's great about snow? It's so clean. It's completely white, but not hospital white... just, snow-white. There's no other way to describe it. It's natural.

It's been snowing on and off lately, never enough to stay during the day. But apparently it snowed last night and absolutely everything is covered with exactly one centimeter of snow, coated over. One centimeter over the driveway. One centimeter over the road. One centimeter clumped up over the grass.

And part of what makes snow so great is that you can see exactly who was out and about after the snowfall. Every step leaves an impression. Every car leaves its tracks in the road. You look at those marks in the snow, and you can see this car driving by in the dead of night, and where it turned you can see those impressions in the snow. And then on top of that there's the tracks of the car that carried the working mom to her job ten miles away. And there's the tracks of the car with the dad who was driving his kid to band practice early in the morning. And there's the senior from down the block, driving to the high school. There's the mail truck. There's the UPS guy. After the snowfall, everybody's tracks start anew.

And you can distinguish from the snow where a car was parked overnight. Where someone walked by and turned the corner. Where somebody came by on a morning jogging route. Where somebody was walking their dog, or, like me, going to the bus stop.

And when you walk through an untouched patch of snow, you leave behind your own prints. And no matter who else stepped right there before, whatever countless hundreds or thousands or millions have tread the same path you walk, when there's snow on the ground, you're the first one.

I suppose that's why the snow seems so clean. Tabula rasa.