After the snow falls in swirls and piles in our backyard, I love to sit and watch the pristine white change to a muddled maze of footprints. Our yard quickly collects a variety of prints, human and animal. Deer come through in packs of three or four late at night. Squirrels scamper everywhere, burrowing with their noses under the snow to find hidden food.
Birds make delicate lacy prints as they scratch for sunflower seeds.
And four sizes of human footprints ramble this way and that. It is the human tracks that give me the most pause, though. My husband and I leave our big bootprints as we casually walk around the yard. Back and forth, on top of, beside and all around ours scatter our children's prints. Though they may stop to brush off a snow-covered swingset or to investigate a set of animal tracks, they always come swinging back to join ours.