All Cleared Up

First plow of the year

It was a balmy 5-degrees above zero this morning, and thank goodness for that, because Rye and I had decided to sleep out last night and had it been a quarter-degree colder, I surely would’ve run whimpering to the house the first time I woke up freezing my goose-bumped ass off. As it was, I just balled myself up tight as the mummy bag would let me and pulled my son close as I could; the little bugger was warm as could be, a hot water bottle of flesh and bone and sour breath and I needed every bit of the heat coming off him to get through the long night.

It’s starting to feel like winter proper. It was a dozen degrees below Saturday morning, with nice little storm forecast for the evening. In my usual style, I had put off mucking with the snowplow until the last moment, and now the last moment was cold enough to make my eyes water and then freeze that water to the slowly numbing surfaces of my cheeks, like little suspended tears, shed over my own idiocy. But I had no one to blame but my own bad self, so I bundled up best as possible and bumbled my way through hitching up the plow, pitching a hissy fit when the confounded thing would not respond to the controller in truck cab, and then finally regaining enough composure to find the corrupted ground wire on the pump relay. If’n any of you suffer under the delusion that my life is just one unbroken stream of cool and collected resourcefulness wedded to soulful gratitude for all the small moments of my days, well… ya shoulda been here Saturday morning when I was hucking tools across the barnyard and swearing a devil’s blue streak. In truth, no tools got hucked, but only because I’m too damn cheap to risk losing them.

Sunday we awoke to a solid 10-inches of new snow, the soft excitement of the land transformed. The boys and I plowed the driveway, a task made all the more satisfying by my struggles of the day before, then they went off to hunt squirrels while Penny and I tended to the home front. The fellas took a fry pan and a small jar of lard with them, the better to cook their quarry over a campfire, and later they returned smelling of woodsmoke and sporting greasy lips. A successful hunt.

•          •          •

With my last couple posts, I fear I may have given the false impression that our sons are saintly little beings with no material desires beyond those of humble home and heated hearth. If so, humor me a brief correction.

Our boys want plenty. Just this weekend, Fin passed a couple of decidedly sour hours bemoaning the fact that we would not allow him to set up a winter camp on a friend’s land a hour from here, where, according to his infallible logic, we should leave him for a week or maybe two to live off the land. No amount of explaining would mollify him, and he descended into a funk of self-pity, all because he must be the only 11-year-old in the world whose parents are soooo uptight and over protective they won’t drop him into the wilderness, alone but for the company of shotgun and traps. Yeah. That’s Penny and me: Uptight and over protective beyond all reason.

Anyway. My point is merely that like most children, my sons exhibit moments (and sometimes, like this weekend, very long and exhausting moments) of discontentedness. When it comes to material goods, they are less apt to verbalize their dissatisfactions, but that doesn’t mean they don’t want things. The pages of the trapping and outdoor supply catalogs they’ve accumulated over the years are thumbworn and wrinkled from over-browsing and when we stop at the local gun shop for ammo or other supplies, they dearly love to peruse the racks of firearms, planning for some distant day when they’ve sold enough ash splits to afford them the deer rifles of their dreams.

Fin’s and Rye’s desires are perhaps somewhat unique to 21st century American culture, and I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t rather have them pining after a rifle, or a week in the woods, than after the current video game console of choice. But just because the subjects of their pining are unique, it doesn’t mean they don’t pine, and I sometimes wonder if it’s merely part of the human condition to want things we don’t have. Perhaps, in a strange way, such wanting is nothing more than a small piece of hope held against an unknown future.

There, now. Hope we got that all cleared up.