Snow is beautiful, almost ridiculously picturesque as it wafts down and blankets the ground, bringing with it a beatific quiet. Wintry mix is radically unromantic, as nicely captured by the word graupel. Wintry mix is a thoroughly Midwestern form of precipitation: practical, unlovely, and unpretentious.

As I pile withered bean bushes into the wheelbarrow, I feel like the sky is spitting on me. I think of Wilson Bentley, the amateur photographer from Vermont who became the first person to take a close-up photograph of a snowflake in 1885. Bentley went on to photograph more than five thousand snowflakes, which he called “ice flowers” and “tiny miracles of beauty.”

Nobody ever called graupel a tiny miracle of beauty, and obviously, I don’t love being pelted by tiny balls of freezing rain or having sleet lash at me from seemingly impossible angles as it blows across the flat and unbroken misery of an Indiana field. And yet . . . I do kind of like wintry mix. It’s one of the ways I know that I’m home.

I love Indianapolis precisely because it isn’t easy to love. You have to stay here a while to know its beauty. You have to learn to read the clouds as something more than threatening or dreary. The words “pathetic fallacy” sound derogatory, and the phrase was originally intended as such when coined by the critic John Ruskin. Of Romantic poets like Scott and Wordsworth, Ruskin wrote, “The love of nature is more or less associated with their weakness.” He would go on to claim that endowing nature with emotion “is always the sign of a morbid state of mind, and comparatively a weak one.”*

Maybe it’s owing to my comparatively weak and morbid state of mind, but the pathetic fallacy often works for me. I like it when Wordsworth wanders lonely as a cloud, or when Scott writes of nature having a “genial glow.” Many of us really are affected by the weather, especially in the slimly lit days of winter. The weather may not have human emotions, but it does cause them. Also, we can’t help but see the world around us in the context of ourselves, especially our emotional selves. That’s not a bug of human consciousness, but a feature of it.

And so, yes, of course precipitation is utterly indifferent to us. As e. e. cummings put it, “the snow doesn’t give a soft white / damn Whom it touches.” And yes, how grateful we are to the modernists for knocking down our doors to inform us that clouds do not threaten or weep, that the only verb a cloud ever verbed was to be. But we give a soft white damn whom snow touches.

Walking the wheelbarrow full of dead, uprooted plants toward our compost pile, I remember a snippet of an Anne Carson poem. “The first snows of winter / floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced / all trace of the world.” But there is no silence here in the land of wintry mix, only the cacophonous tit-a-tat white noise of graupel bombarding the ground.