The First Mark in Snow

When I was seven, my grandfather taught me that the first person to walk across a fresh snowfall was the only one who truly owned the morning. We lived in a house where the garden gate was always stiff, and on the mornings after a heavy storm, I would push against it with all my weight just to be the first to break the surface. I remember the sound—a crisp, hollow crunch that felt like tearing through a clean sheet of paper. There was a strange, quiet power in leaving a line behind me, a temporary map of where I had been before the wind or the neighbors could erase it. We spent our lives trying to leave a mark on things that are meant to be blank, hoping that if we move carefully enough, we might find a path that leads somewhere worth going. Does the trail exist because we walk it, or were we always meant to follow the curve of the land?

Ronnie Glover has taken this beautiful image titled Ski Trail. It captures that same quiet invitation to step into the unknown and leave a mark of our own. Does this path look like a beginning to you, or an end?