This is the kind of snow that serves up in beauty what it lacks in volume. Big, wet flakes drape themselves on every surface, every limb, every wire, painting scenes of childhood dreams, the kind that animated Currier and Ives and allured Robert Frost.

It is the kind of snow in which evergreens bow under the influence of a million flakes while their bare-leafed neighbors strut their stuff, flaunting every bend and twist and curve beneath their glaze of white.

It is the kind of snow I love walking in, a bit, but mostly enjoy admiring from inside a warm, cozy home. No events will be cancelled today; most plans will not change; most people, I imagine, will just marvel at winter’s gentle beauty as they go about their day.

Yet I also wonder about the panhandlers who frequent the Squares where the local commerce happens. The ones who singsong their plaint, serenading you as you walk past, asking you either to buy their one copy of a shopworn paper or give them spare change. Your choice: spare change or newspaper. (I imagine that is to wiggle around the “no soliciting” rules.) They are part street musicians; part vendors; part local color; part nuisance. The lines between the parts keep shifting.

Still, where exactly do they live? Where are they in this snow?

And the clerk at the local stationers. We spoke a bit this week about the store’s closing next month, he with traces of fear he meant to stifle but could not hide. It was a raw, unexpected moment of intimacy that neither he nor I quite knew how to handle.

The stationers is on a corner. Just across the street in one direction is a bank, a credit union to be precise. And just across the street in another is a church. The clerk is flanked by the domain of commerce and the realm of the spirit. One might be given to imagine that when in need, this is the place to be, nestled in the midst of the currencies of earth and heaven. Yet I fear the clerk might fall in between, neither of them reaching out to scoop him up in his hour of need.

What role, do we, his neighbors, patrons, fellow sojourners, have toward him and the panhandlers and all the others who might not welcome this snow, whose needs have not been met by the world in which they live?

Still the snow falls, draping the trees. It seems so lovely outside.