When it first falls from clouded skies, snow is beautiful and soft. It hushes the world, and those who watch its progress are content to smile and reminisce. As it accumulates, it covers everything with its purity and its pearl white so that even that which was ugly now sparkles with the magic of a fairytale. Its is the most breathtaking of natural beauty, and none can help but be intoxicated by its presence. All that it falls on is seduced into forgetting the inherent transience of its nature - this is why the sun always shocks when it breaks through the clouds. When crisp and solid beauty melts until it is formless, and then until ugliness begins to peek through it again, and finally until it is reduced to mud and slush that dirties the shoes of busy people and makes them angry. So they curse its ugly remains and wish it would leave entirely. Always their wishes are realized, and the mud and slush dry up and disappear until all that is left of the beauty of the snow is its memory and an empty bitterness and the small hope that perhaps another storm might come. So humanity sits in this way and prays that the clouds would come back, or, more desperately, that they had never left at all.