In Deep

The storm was excellent. I got out early on Friday morning to plow – first our 1/4 mile drive, then the lot of our mechanic, a small return on his repeated prior investments of selflessly loaning us tools (it’s a rare thing, a mechanic that loans tools, and one that is never to be taken for granted) – and on the drive into town, the snow was barreling down in the dark, the truck’s headlights illuminating only a dim patch of whitewashed road, and it felt as if I were driving into a future that ended just beyond the high beam’s reach. Which, in one way or another, I suppose I was.

I love plowing; it’s ridiculous, I know, and I probably shouldn’t admit to it, but there’s something inordinately pleasing about pushing aside walls of snow from within the truck’s heated cab, a travel mug of coffee wedged into my crotch, classic rock crackling through the Ford’s old speakers. Used to be the boys always came with me, but their interest is waning, and besides, they’ve started sleeping in a bit and I like plowing in the dark.

All the snow slows things down considerable like. There’s too much snow for me to be in the woods with the tractor, so my firewood gathering efforts have been curtailed. Fortunately, the day before the storm, I’d hauled a dozen or so logs, scurrying to skid them out of the woods before dark so they wouldn’t be buried. We have too many paths to shovel, so we just push our way through our daily routines, and now you can see our habits written into the snow. The path to the barn, with a detour to the water hydrant. Path to the chicken coop, then onto the pig house. Path to the solar panels, to sweep the accumulated snow from their surface. Not much sticks in my craw like a bank of panels covered by snow, the sun beating on them futilely.

And, after the weekend, the willy-nilly paths left by our skis, on our way to or from a slog in the fields and forest. The snow’s so deep that the ungroomed cross country skiing isn’t actually that good; the effort required to break trail is immense. After we spent an hour-and-a-half trudging and sweating our way through the woods on Saturday, Penny and I hired the boys to track us a loop around the field. For a buck each, they circled the pasture on snowshoes, leaving a nice, glide-ready track, which we then circled three times, over-sized hamsters dressed in wool. Pathetic, I know, but hey. Desperate times call for desperate measures and all that.

There’s not much winter left. Certainly not enough to get done everything we’d hoped to get done this winter. My office is still unpainted. The onion drying racks remain unfixed, though we made do with them last fall, and we’ll probably make do with them this fall, too. The basement did not get organized, at least not to the extent I imagined back in November, when it seemed as if winter would last just about forever. I sure didn’t get much lumber milled, and now there’s a whole ‘nuther pile of sawlogs begging attention. It’ll be a busy summer. It always is.

In a couple weeks, we’ll be hauling sap and seeding, and there is no surer harbinger of spring than the first gather, or those early flats of seedlings and the particular smell of sun-warmed potting soil. You can feel the sun getting higher in the sky; you can feel the days getting longer, being stretched at each end like silly putty. It’s a good and even great feeling, made possible only because not so long ago, you could actually feel the days contract. The thing is, at the time it was the contraction that felt good, the settling into the darkness and all the restive moments it promised.

Funny how that works, isn’t it? It’s almost as if it was designed that way.