the snow this morning

The snow this morning, it glistened and glittered.

And have you ever thought about how so many words we associate with light and shining begin with that gl-? It's a guttural gulp for expressing something so airy and bright, but English is a funny language. I can say that because I once took a class on morphology—how we put words together—and my mind glowed with excitement when I learned this gl- thing.

It's a sound, a building block of language, that English speakers, mostly unwittingly, associate with light. Given a very unfamiliar word beginning in gl-, most of us, without thinking about it too much, would very likely define it along the lines of glisten, glitter, gleam, glint.

We would hear this unfamiliar word, and if we were from a certain part of the country and it was a certain time of the year, we might think about the snow glistening and glittering.

I did the morning. I had slept much later than normal, but I justified the skipped morning workout by saying to myself {s I lay a-bed}: You swam a mile yesterday. The distance stretched out in front of me, and I stretched my legs, resettling into my flannel sheets and down comforter.

Sometimes, you have to cut yourself some slack; I'm trying to learn this.

I took an extra-long walk this morning through the brisk February air, and I stopped and admired the snow. Sometimes, you have to do that.