I gazed out the window at the snow. “Deer tracks,” my mind noted. But I didn’t really see them. Instead, I saw an image of the hillside in springtime, covered with fresh greenery and heaps of tiny pink and white spring beauties. It was a wishful daydream, reassuring somehow. The spring beauties really are there, asleep beneath the snow, beneath the nurturing earth. And they will come. In their own good time they will come.
As the daydream dissolved, I noticed I was looking at the deer tracks again. I know deer live in the woods up the hill, but I only get to see them once or twice a year. They’re content up there, and safe. Here was evidence that they’re still around, that they visit at night, walking through when I can’t see them, when the world is still and the traffic on the road below me ceases for a few hours, except for an occasional passing car.
The sight of the tracks was as reassuring as my daydream of springtime, a reminder that beauty and grace are real, even when it’s not time for them to show themselves to my waiting, hungry eyes.