I hadn’t planned to write this Commentary for this issue, but then it snowed last weekend–really snowed, about a foot at our farm in Virginia and about two feet in New York City and New England–and my mood changed. It was the kind of snow that covers everything, that fouls up your plans (especially if you’re traveling and especially if you’re flying), that can even cut you off from the world. Like any kind of storm these days, snow messes up our lives, sometimes horribly. But it’s just so beautiful, nature’s most glorious weather phenomenon.

If you have horses, life with them in snow is sort of a microcosm of the dilemma snow brings to our culture. It quickly escalates the difficulty of taking care of them.

A heavy storm like this means that, first, you have to dig your way to the barn and dig open the doors. Then you have to carry even more hay than usual out to their paddocks, because there’s nothing else to eat. And if you don’t have frost-free spigots out at those paddocks, you’ve got to heft the water out there too, blasting through the drifts like a Coast Guard icebreaker in the Arctic. Even turning the horses out takes longer with that snow weighing down every footfall. And then you’ve still got to carry or push what you take out of their stalls out to the manure pile. So you’ll probably have to dig a path out there too, while you’re digging out the truck and trailer and any cars you might want to use.

When the snow’s falling, some horses remind us that their ancestors came from winter climates and that their fur, their hooves and other parts of their bodies are perfectly adapted for cold, snowy days as they romp or eat happily, as if nothing were unusual. Others remind us how we’ve turned them into hothouse flowers. In one field we have Cruiser, our 3-year-old Vermont-bred who just arrived in January and had probably wondered what had happened to winter, and Bradley, a 12-year-old former show jumper learning to be a foxhunter. Watching them while the snow fell on Saturday, at first I thought Cruiser didn’t like the weather since he was chasing Bradley around, near the barn. Then I realized that Bradley was watching for someone to bring him in from the snow, and Cruiser was mad at him because he wouldn’t leave the barn to play.

But when I turned them out the next morning, Bradley rolled happily in the powdery fluff, barely outside his door. I had to wait for him to finish to close it behind him. And when I led my horse Merlin out, he too dropped to the ground while I was reaching for Munchkin, his companion pony. Merlin kept trying to roll as I led him to his field, then hit the deck as soon as I’d slipped his halter. Munchkin watched, up to his hocks in snow, then dived for the indentation before Merlin chased him off so he could roll again, an act they humorously repeated two or three times.

As I stood there watching them play, a few birds hungrily chirping, I basked in the peace and quiet of the early morning new-fallen blanket. It was like my favorite kind of painting, as the sun began to climb in the sky, throwing a reddish glow on the first ridge of the Appalachians a few miles west. Ah, yes, so tranquil and so divine. And then I remembered the shoveling I still had to do. As I said, a modern dilemma.