Softball In The Snow
Some of you know that I’m an avid softball player. I played baseball as a young man, but injuries and a demanding touring schedule kept me off the diamond for many, many years. A few years ago, I discovered and fell in love with the game of softball. I play in several leagues each year and being out on the diamond with my teammates brings me a huge amount of joy.
There’s a town about 20 miles away from where I live that has a new softball complex where the fields are covered in astroturf. Because these fields are safe to play on in just about any kind of weather, we have, for the first time, a winter league. Yesterday was Opening Day.
Although we’ve been having some sunny weather lately, yesterday we had rain, wind, hail and snow.
I arrived at the fields at about 6:45 p.m., to stretch and “warm up” for our 7:15 game. The brilliantly lit fields shone bright brown and green as huge flakes of snow slanted down, their pure white stunningly amplified by the powerful stadium lights.
Now I’m no meteorologist, but I do know that the presence of snow means that there are clouds in the sky. Even so, I swear to you that as I stood at my position at first base on this cheerfully colored and brightly lit field being covered by a steady fall of snow, there, high in the sky, was a huge, clear and completely unobstructed full moon.
Unbelievable.
How indescribably beautiful. How inadequate my words seem to relate to you the near religious feeling of the moment. The joy I always feel on the ballfield was multiplied by 100. Not only were we, the intrepid Charlie Browns of the region, ready to play ball in the snow and thereby cut our off-season down by a couple of months, but were witness to, and participants in, a moment of sheer magic.
Spring is not yet here, but I am reborn.
Play ball!
