The whole world was quiet, or seemed so. The house, spread over with snow, and the fields all around, normally filled with grasses and small animals, were completely white and silent, like a movie, the opening scene in which only music plays. The camera moves over the landscape, focusing on a dark figure coming out of the brush - the main character doomed to undergo a horrible ordeal, but emerge, at the end, triumphant. I knew as well as anyone that things don’t always happen that way - good people are murdered on back roads, hacked to pieces and discovered by some luckless passerby - but at that moment the world seemed perfect. Silent, but for the laughter of a woodpecker in the distance.

There were the beginnings of a storm in the air; a cold breeze, an odd silence, but it wasn’t there yet. There was only an unbroken white field of snow, a stand of trees along the road in the distance, maybe a few animals stirring somewhere. If I looked, I wondered, would I find the world’s end beyond the horizon? It was miles to town, with few neighbors and no means to get to them, and I loved it on mornings like these, where it was only me and the wide, quiet world. It was a beauty you didn’t see anywhere else (a fierce, terrible beauty, at times), all vastness, majesty, and quiet.

A pair of red gloves lay over the back of a chair, and I slid these on, working my fingers into the empty space. I was going to a movie that day, but there was enough time to do what I wanted.

So I did. Pulling on boots and cold-weather clothing that awaited me in the hall closet, I slipped out the back door and into the cold. There was a small porch that was still bare, but the rest of the yard and the fields beyond were white, simple and clear. There was a rickety wooden fence one-fifty, maybe two hundred yards to the left - the neighbor’s property, his house standing small and dark in the distance - a road running north and south toward town, and I looked all that over, admiring the white. When you stand in the middle of the world like this, it can’t be anything but beautiful.

I walked a little further into the field, leaving an uneven trail of footprints. The first of the day. Kneeling to sink my hands into the snow, I looked back toward the house, all red paint and sliding glass doors that were a very bad idea, but that I had to have just the same. It was a neat, quiet little house on a plot of land far too large. Twenty-nine acres, no trees.

There was nature in my stomach then, and if that feeling is what make people throw their hands up in church, I think I understand.