Category: winter

No one wants to see these photos. No one wants to look backwards even a few days right now.

It’s March, and fifty-degree temperatures are rounding the snow, revealing brown grass, and yellowing the willows. The sun seems encouraged by our willingness to shift our clocks towards daylight, so it erases the snow, humiliates it into brown grey shadows and sloppy weeping heaps.

Like everyone, I lift my scarfless face outside and smile. My hatless hair warms. We are finally able to really play in the snow, now that it sticks to itself and the wind doesn’t cut at our cheeks and eyeballs. We build a snow fort guarded by a snowperson, who gazes wistfully across the field while shrinking. We squelch back to the house, soaking wet.

It will snow again, no doubt, but the deep of winter has passed, and I won’t forget it. Winter burned itself into my brain. It carved new muscles into my arms and new images into my retinas.

As winter recedes, spring is ugly and messy for the moment, like something just born. I think about how winter is both an afterlife and a beforelife. The flames of fall gutter into ashes, and the phoenix of spring will rise. In the sharp white days between, we wait.

Although our houses and cars and fossil fuels and well-traveled food insulate us from winter’s leanest realities, it is still real. Our first winter in years outside the Deep South has reminded us how raw and long it can feel. The dramatic northeastern seasons will sculpt us, honing our edges like wind on the drifts, turning us on the lathe of the year into eloquent curving shapes.

Today I buy boots. Mud-loving boots that open the door and carry me into this wet season. Our eight rubber boots that stairstep by twos in the mudroom will traipse the soft earth, ready to leave new marks on our farm, ready for its imprints on us.

O shovel, with yellow blade and curved handle for sparing my unspared back. It glides my driveway like a typewriter, old technology, back and forth.

Like vacuuming, which my mom once told me organizes your brain. So I welcome repetition—lean, push, walk, lift, lean, push. By spring, my thoughts will be color-coded and alphabetical, sitting neatly on dust-free shelves.

Like pulling a paddle through a lake. Canoeing Minnesota’s Boundary Waters for our honeymoon, I notched my paddle each day until twenty-eight tallies gouged the pale wood. On this first, honeymoon winter at the farm, I feel the urge to mark my shovel. To etch its plastic each day, or maybe cover it with decals, like a well-traveled guitar case.

This work, I realize, is for our cars, which I envy as I brush thick snow from their windows and headlights, then clear a path before them. Such service we provide them.

Shoveling in tandem, we stay close enough to talk, but mostly don’t talk. Work towards each other, then one of us moves a dozen paces upslope and starts fresh. He doesn’t rush, conserving energy with efficient form. His shoulders square, he pushes and hoists snow calmly onto growing piles. I hunch my shoulders, two hands gripping, bulldozing. My feet hustle. I barely contain exuberance. In work, we each echo our own parents.

O shovel, light enough for kids to help. It meanders ahead of Sam, carving a path all over, up and down, looping the car six times. Stella places one mitten on the handle, walks with me. At the driveway’s edge, she screws up her face and grunts her hand into the air, assisting my lift and toss.

Heavy snow makes me feel both real and charmed. Dormant muscles awaken to the snow’s relentless coming, to its sparkling weight. So much devotion to moving piles of water out of our way. I imagine the garden this summer and how much we might plant when I swap this shovel for another, dig soil, and turn all this shoveling energy into food.

Full of Georgia sweet potatoes that we baked in crisp, soft-centered medallions for lunch, we have enough energy to head outside. That is, we have enough energy to spend 20 minutes herding our kids into the layers of clothing, snowpants, hats, mittens, scarves, coats, and boots required in zero degree, still-snowing weather. Sam wears my grandpa Andrew Lehman’s scarf, which I wore in college, crocheting a bright orange patch to keep it alive. Stella wears the hat my husband Andrew wore when we first started dating in college; she likes its dangly pom-pom.

Well-packaged, we clomp out through our disheveled mudroom and into the snow. It fell most of the night and all morning. It keeps coming, now in small fast bits that tingle our cheeks, and now in bigger dreamy flakes that circle and move sideways. The driveway needs shoveling for the fourth time, but it’ll wait.

We have sleds.

We have a rip-ready 5 year old and a semi-convinced 3 year old and all of the enthusiasm from our own childhoods juicing our untrained limbs. Neither kid can make much headway in snow up to their waists, so we tote them. Stella, wary of the sled, will only ride piggyback. Sam squawks excitedly riding uphill on the sled pulled by Andrew.

In fact, it’s slow sledding, this nearly two feet of softness. We leave the sleds and hike uphill towards a tall drift, wading through snow that varies from calf-deep to butt-deep.

Moving with resistance feels satisfying. I have always loved being immersed in water. Even frozen into billions of unique, feathery crystals, this water holds us. It cushions, forgiving us when we flail and fall. We can swim. I feel buoyant.

 

 

I feel out of breath. We flop down at the base of the drift. Soon, Andrew tosses Sam on top of it, and they make a sliding board, which delights even our skeptical Stella, who forgets her frozen nose while sliding. Then, Andrew digs like a badger, emerging with his beard frosted from inside a cave that Sam can nearly sit up in.

Thrashing back downhill, we carry our kids and the warmth of exertion. My ears are full of my breathing, creaking snow under my boots, and the swish of my waterproof pants, but the world is quiet when I pause.

Gulps of the air taste like our well water, fresh and cold. Our legs and sleds have plowed tracks across the smooth hill, and we follow ourselves back to the house.

 

Tomorrow morning, the wind will have swept the glowing hillside clean. The only deep tracks around the house will be from a rabbit that must’ve gone in over his ears with each hop.

On Sunday, I woke last and felt luxurious. Lying on my side, I opened my eyes to the cat sitting on all of her feet in the windowsill. The morning light had sharp edges, and something seemed peculiar. I raised my head and greeted the cat. Her eyes squinted happily at me. Then I realized: She was sitting in the sill of a half-open window.

“Whoa! Sam and Stella!” I called, swinging my legs off the bed and arms towards the window simultaneously. I headed to find them, but detoured into another bedroom to close its wide-open window. They had tiptoed everywhere, opening windows.

The kids bounced around their bedroom like shiny-cheeked crickets, chirping about the fresh air and how they were Not Cold, in fact they were hot. Both windows in their room gaped, inviting winter indoors. I spoiled their fun and invited them to go outdoors instead, which, of course, they declined.  I can’t blame them; it really is cold out there.

All of the windows are closed tonight, though you can feel a slight breeze through the kitchen, where mud is drying on newly hung sheetrock. It isn’t the coldest night we’ve had—just zero degrees—but the wind is teaching me how porous an old house really is.

Tonight the house breathes. I can hear its inhalations with every gust of wind through the cedars that circle, hunched, beside it. The house inhales through outlets, stove vent, window edges, places behind the cupboards, the space between its chiseled grey stone foundation and our wooden floors. Like a salamander, it seems to breathe through its skin.

A cold cold night feels like a thunderstorm, beautiful and menacing. As we sleep, pipes freeze in the kitchen, despite a thermostat set at sixty degrees. Snow blows across the fields like steam. On our mudroom floor, mice killed in traps freeze solid so they must be pried free in the morning.

I am amazed that any animals are left alive outside after a night like this one, but we will see them tomorrow. Surviving with their small bodies in fur or feathers. Or we will see them in spring, if they endure winter by slowing their hearts towards death, just a few beats per minute, their temperatures guttered, their bodies nearly turned to stone.

We, the awake and naked species, require long underwear and heated rooms to make it through winter. We also make potato soups with mushrooms, flavored with marjoram, thyme, and a pinch of nutmeg, to spoon thickly into our mouths. We stack library books twenty high, and snuggle under blankets to read aloud Farmer Boy, transporting ourselves to Almanzo Wilder’s upstate New York farm with stolid barns warmed by horses and oxen. And our kids run circles around our small oak table in our big square kitchen, skipping and galloping, with Stella yelling, “I’m warming up my body!”