Grace Church. Manhattan.

As I write this, my little Cape Cod village is experiencing its first snow, and even after all these years, I marvel at the way it transforms the familiar, quickens the senses, jolts me awake. A brown, bare world turns itself inside out, and all I can do is stare.

This past weekend, I had occasion to visit Manhattan to celebrate my sister’s birthday. New York is at its most wondrous in December, its most generous. Windows at Bergdorf Goodman, windows at Sak’s, windows at Macy’s are bursts of splendor and imagination. Christmas trees sparkle with a fairy-tale radiance. The air is slightly acrid with roasted chestnuts mounded in foil-covered bowls on vendors’ carts. And everywhere, there are throngs of people inching along the sidewalks, jamming subway cars, clustering in front of those spectacular windows.

In this city, I am often overwhelmed to the point of shut-down. Sometimes all I can do is keep moving, my knee aching, my senses blurred with the enormity of it all, and the quantum leap I have taken from my quiet life in a town that boards itself up for a long winter’s nap, where the December silence is as deep as the ocean that surrounds it.

New York is like a police siren, electric as a hot wire twisting down a Main Street bereft of lights. I look for places of refuge in the midst of the cacophony: the third floor of the New York Public Library, the second floor of ABC Carpet & Home, the way-back stacks at the Strand bookshop. Places to reclaim my senses after constant assault, so that I can surge again into the mad carnival and let its over-the-top-ness make me bigger, stronger, more alive.

All day Saturday, the first snow drifted down on New York, adding another layer of enchantment. Walking up lower Broadway after dinner in a charming little Italian restaurant, I saw this church (appropriately named “Grace Church”) through the falling snow. There are moments that bring us up short, moments when the world turns itself inside out, moments where there is nothing but the moment. Sometimes it happens when I’m looking at a painting or into the eyes of someone I love or hearing a poem or listening to the wind in the dried oak leaves, sometimes just the smell of new snow will do it.

Grace Church, with its mystery and grandeur, its tangle of haunted forest, snow curving around the walkway to the gothic door took me to a place beyond even New York, to a place where there is only rejoicing and awe, wonder and magic, complete, sacred stillness. Grace can do that, dig itself deep, make its way right down to the soul. Turn us inside out.