A recent winter storm — on the national weather map it looked like a smear of spilled paint — brought a misery of ice and snow to so many across the country, but here in the Upper Valley the effect was very different: soft powder easily swept aside by plow or shovel. Yes, the temperature was bitter — minus 17 at dawn on my porch a day before the storm and just a few degrees warmer in the days that followed — but who, turning away from streets and sidewalks, cannot see beauty in a blanket of fresh snow?
Okay, I’m retired, no job to get to no matter what, and I live at the end of a long dirt road where snowbanks stay white until Spring. Four score and then some in years and lucky to have my health, I’ speaking in a personal way, a little high on a week of venturing into the woods on snowshoes, long treks uphill and down, breaking trail. I had to bundle up, of course, but hard work is almost as good as a woodstove to generate heat from core to fingertips. The silence in the woods is profound, and trackless, sculpted snow is a window into immortality. The land, the machine of Nature, will go on in some form forever, and we creatures, fruit fly or human, are brief visitors.
Back on human time now where I count years in decades, I am coming up on an anniversary: This August will mark twenty years since I walked into the emergency room at DHMC with what turned out to be a pneumonia so inflammatory that it nearly took my life. Today, the details of that month-long hospitalization (3/4 of it in intensive care) now seem less important to me than the years since, which now comprise nearly a quarter of my life. My sole grandchild at that time, not even a year old, was steadier on his feet than I was the day I was released from the hospital. Today he is a sophomore in college and one of four grandchildren I would have never known as I do if my 50/50 odds had fallen the other way. Add to those phenomena twenty years of adventures with the woman I married in 1968, and the horrors of August 2006 are in near-total eclipse.
In the final week of my hospital stay — when the fog of drugs began to lift and I began to believe I might survive — it was an object of beauty, a small pot of orchids sent FTD by my mother-in-law, that wrenched me from despair and gave me hope. I had been aware of it for a week, perhaps, sitting on a table not far from my bed together with books and cards from family and friends, but up until this moment, the magic of its beauty had been invisible to me. I was alone in my room, had to be alone to be so struck by three flowers on a thin stalk, but there they were, trumpeting about the meaning and purpose of life.
Life is too complex, too interwoven with strands of comedy, tragedy, and romance to be reduced to a single image, but I suddenly believed that beauty as the poet Keats saw it, one side of an equation with truth sitting on the other, would be waiting for me everywhere once I left my hospital room. Indeed it was. Breathing was hard for me and painful, but half an hour from the hospital, we turned onto our land and a small flock of goldfinches exploded from a wild apple tree and flew uphill over the hayfield.
When my wife and I talk about these twenty years that might not have happened, we measure time with the birthdays of our grandchildren, with what grade they are in school, and the marks on our pantry doorframe that witness their growth. Everything comes down to family at my age, where my youth and vitality are gone, and a career that spanned more than 40 years is just a yellowing photograph. These manifestations of family – a grandson in college talking to a cousin half his age and sounding like he really cares, a kindergartener swirling a paintbrush in a glass of water, a spontaneous FaceTime from a 16 year-old while he’s sharpening his skis — have more in common with snowshoeing on a cold morning than I ever could have suspected when I myself was young.
There is so much to worry about, fresh evidence every day of a world gone mad, that I understand now better than ever how my mother could say at a time when she had not quite reached the age I am today, that she was done with life. She wasn’t well and could barely breathe, and for her the beauty of the world had winked out. Not for me, not yet, and for this I know how lucky I am.