Kind of a late-bloomer, isn’t it? This winter, I mean. Just when it seemed as though I’d get through the whole winter in sneakers, a lovely heavy snowfall stole softly across New England. I had to dig my boots out of the closet to get across the yard to the barn; they were still rigged with microspikes from an icy hike months ago.
Now, in the storm’s aftermath, with a couple of feet in the backyard and snow banks along the roads, everything feels different. Quieter. Slower. The house is capped and banked with fresh white snow and feels like a snuggery. The birds that normally flutter around the feeder now instead sit glumly on the railing beneath it, all fluffed up against the cold and appearing to be just killing time. Where else is there to go, and what else is there to do?
I’m happy that the deer who haunt the neighborhood now have plenty of snow in which to make their beds, down out of the wind. But the browse must be getting a bit thin; they’re out most of the day, nibbling as they go. They’ve pulled all the leaves off Mother’s rosebushes. All around the house she planted a kind of yew that they don’t like. I’ve seen them nibbling at its tender ends, looking at it for a few seconds, and then walking away. But they’ve utterly destroyed three little evergreen somethings that had been struggling in the shade beside the ramp up to the back porch. The deer had to be only about eight feet away from me at my desk as they did it. I’ll probably replace the bushes with periwinkle myrtle in the spring. It likes the shade, and always reminds me of our old dog, who loved to snuffle at it when it was in bloom.
From where I sit, I can see the gable and peak of the barn. About a year ago I finally got an old upside-down porcelain dishpan fixture (salvaged from a Barre granite shed) mounted way up there, with a motion detector down below. Every so often on a quiet night the floodlight switches on, and I look up to see a startled deer in the yard, wondering what in the world’s happening.
Downtown, the road crews have been busy clearing the streets for traffic, but the snow banks remain on each side, parked cars squeezing the travel lanes. Still, I don’t detect any impatience — at least not from cars with Vermont plates. We’re all in the same boat here, recognize that we’ll be moving slower for a while, and cut each other some slack in order to move everything along. Stuck behind a plow, we generally putt along behind it. There’s very little, if anything, to be gained by passing it, or even trying to pass.
Along the sidewalks in front of the shops, the old Inuit Shuffle is in vogue: folks taking little tiny steps and looking down for slippery patches. I first saw the shuffle some years ago in an airport in Montreal. There were quite a few Inuit waiting for commuter flights northward; and even on the dry poured granite floor of the terminal they did it. “What’s with that?” I asked my buddy Dudley, who’d spent several years in Alaska.
“Well,” he said, “if you spent most of your life walking on frozen ground or snow or ice in sealskin mukluks or moccasins as smooth as slippers on the bottom, you’d walk that way, too.” I find now, with advancing age, that the memory of many past tumbles, some of them bone-snappers, dictates I join the comic parade.
At home, tight as it is and with all the firewood in the cellar, there’s little incentive to, or necessity of, venturing forth, except to visit Mother morning and evening and stop occasionally for coffee with friends. I’ve been blessed with a son-in-law with a plow truck and driveway sander and an apparent soft spot for geezers with snow or ice between them and the road. The rumble of his plow is music to my ears. All I’ve got to do is keep the vehicle of the day out of the way, and afterward shovel away the little windrows of snow in front of the porch ramp and garage doors.
Downstairs, the wood-burning boiler and I seem to have gotten used to each other. One reason may be that I’m burning firewood intended for use a year ago, a winter warm enough that I rarely lit the furnace. Now that wood is dry as a cork leg — hard maple, yellow birch, beech, and red oak — and lights right up from the coals.
I keep a box of kindling handy to restart the fire after a several hours’ absence, but the furnace has begun holding a bed of coals. Rake it forward with the hearth shovel, lay a few split chunks on top, and go away again for a few hours. The boiler feeds hot water into the boiler of the oil-burning furnace and relieves the load on that. The kindling box hasn’t needed refilling.
Standing there briefly in the warm air around the furnace, I remember my mother, who wasn’t much of a fan of being cold. During the war a little over 70 years ago, it was very hard to get coal. My sister and I hauled it in paper sacks on my sled, up Geddes Street hill from the People’s Coal Company, and our mother fed it into the furnace as sparingly as she dared. Then she stood with her back to the open furnace door and lifted her skirt behind to catch all the heat she could. Early mornings, she took the chill off the kitchen and her back side with the gas oven.
For 35 years my guys and I worked right through the calendar. I can’t say I miss much the shoveling out the job in the morning, or sledge-hammering the frozen lumber apart to work with it. Still, all that discomfort and all those cracked, frozen fingers purchased the comfort I feel today, gazing out the window as another storm approaches and reheating my coffee in the microwave.
Willem Lange’s column appears here on Wednesday. He can be reached at willem.lange@comcast.net.
