First day of February, and in the far corner of the yard the Adirondack chair, blown over by the wind at Christmas, is still on its back, the snow too deep for me to traipse out and right it, the ice too sheer to risk slamming these old bones to the ground.
In April I will walk out across the warming grass, and right the chair as if there had never been anything to stop me in the first place, listening for the buzz of hummingbirds which reminds me of how fast things are capable of moving. ~John Stanizzi “Ascension”
photo by Josh Scholten
I want to believe we’ve already had our winter and now it’s done. Turning the calendar to February, I hope we’ll begin a gradual warming trend to spring.
For a few days in January, I had the constant challenge of finding safe footing when surfaces were snow and ice-covered; I certainly didn’t want to add to the burden of the local orthopedists who were busy putting together broken arms and legs and dislocated joints from too many unscheduled landings.
Despite what the calendar says, sometimes winter is never quite done with us. I know in my head that winter is not forever — February will wrap up its short stay of 29 days and once again I will move about with ease without worrying about iced-over frosty walkways. But my heart is not so easily convinced as I become more risk-averse, worrying about fractures.
So my heart and head and aging bones need reminding: Those who traipse on slick surfaces will always risk being broken. Those who have fallen will be righted and put together again. Those who suffer regret are forgiven even when pain is not easily forgotten. And time moves quickly on, despite our efforts to hold on to now; my old bones and tender heart are healed when and if I still can be of use to others.
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January’s drop-down menu leaves everything to the imagination: splotch the ice, splice the light, remake the spirit…
Just get on with it, doing what you have to do with the gray palette that lies to hand. The sun’s coming soon.
A future, then, of warmth and runoff, and old faces surprised to see us. A cache of love, I’d call it, opened up, vernal, refreshed. ~Sidney Burris “Runoff”
photo of hair ice taken by Laura Reifel
When the calendar finally reaches this last day of January, resplendent in its grayest pallor, I have to realize there are six weeks of winter yet ahead.
This past month, nature offered many options on the drop-down menu. Take your pick: soupy foggy mornings, drizzly mid-days, crisp northeast winds with sub-zero wind chill, unexpected snow dumps with icy rain, balmy southerlies with flooding, too many soggy soppy puddly evenings.
Every once in awhile there was a special on the menu: icy spikes on grass blades, frozen droplets on birch branches, hair ice on wood, crystallized weeds like jewelry in the sun, a pink flannel blanket sunrise, an ocean-of-orange sunset.
I realize January’s gray palette is merely preparation for what comes next. There is Love cached away, and as spring is slowly revealed, it will not let me go.
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White cat Winter prowls the farm, tiptoes soft through withered corn, creeps along low walls of stone, falls asleep beside the barn. ~Tony Johnson “White Cat Winter”
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder. Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum. The cat stretching her black body from the pillow. The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture. Then laps the bowl clean. Then wants to go out into the world where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn, then sits, perfectly still, in the grass. I watch her a little while, thinking: what more could I do with wild words? I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her. I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me. ~Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems
Cat, if you go outdoors, you must walk in the snow. You will come back with little white shoes on your feet, little white shoes of snow that have heels of sleet. Stay by the fire, my Cat. Lie still, do not go. See how the flames are leaping and hissing low, I will bring you a saucer of milk like a marguerite, so white and so smooth, so spherical and so sweet – stay with me, Cat. Outdoors the wild winds blow.
Outdoors the wild winds blow, Mistress, and dark is the night, strange voices cry in the trees, intoning strange lore, and more than cats move, lit by our eyes green light, on silent feet where the meadow grasses hang hoar – Mistress, there are portents abroad of magic and might, and things that are yet to be done. Open the door! ~Elizabeth Coatsworth“On a Night of Snow”
I know folks who worry about our farm cats’ well-being during the recent harsh winter weather. Our farm cats don’t know what it is like to live in a house, and certainly know nothing about the use of kitty litter boxes. They are independent souls, used to being on outdoor patrol and never question the conditions of their employment to manage all aspects of vermin control.
The cats own the barns, pure and simple. This is not a matter for debate among the farm dogs (who also live in the barns during very cold weather) or from the horses, or from us farmers who come and go doing the feeding and watering and cleaning. We all bow down to the cats’ supremacy. Four farm cats distribute themselves among several buildings according to who they like and who they don’t like and then settle in for the duration. They scoot in and out as they please as we open and close the big barn doors against the chill winds and happily lap up whatever treats we bring them.
So please don’t worry. Our cats and other critters are doing just fine this winter. It’s the two humans here who are creakier while we navigate the snow and ice and must bundle up head to toe to face the northeast wind.
As wonderful as farm living can be, it is always more challenging in the winter, especially since it is up to us to supply our own treats…
photo by Nate Gibson
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It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they’re supposed to be. I’ve been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window? ~Pat Schneider “The Patience of Ordinary Things”
…leave me a little love, A voice to speak to me in the day end, A hand to touch me in the dark room Breaking the long loneliness. In the dusk of day-shapes Blurring the sunset, One little wandering, western star Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow. Let me go to the window, Watch there the day-shapes of dusk And wait and know the coming Of a little love. ~Carl Sandburg from “At a Window”
Everything looks a little different when framed by a window, especially in the winter when protected from the weather. I am set apart, looking out, rather than immersed within the icy snowy landscape myself.
With that separation, I feel as though I could be looking at the past, the present or the future.
It is not unlike being in an art museum, walking past masterpieces that offer a framed view into another time and place, populated with people I don’t know and will never meet.
So I go to the windows, moving through the house and peering out at the life that awaits beyond the frame. But rather than simply admire the view, protected as I am from the chill wind, I find the courage to walk out the door into whatever awaits beyond the glass.
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Low clouds hang on the mountain. The forest is filled with fog. A short distance away the Giant trees recede and grow Dim. Two hundred paces and They are invisible. All Day the fog curdles and drifts. The cries of the birds are loud. They sound frightened and cold. Hour By hour it grows colder. Just before sunset the clouds Drop down the mountainside. Long Shreds and tatters of fog flow Swiftly away between the Trees. Now the valley below Is filled with clouds like clotted Cream and over them the sun Sets, yellow in a sky full Of purple feathers. After dark A wind rises and breaks branches From the trees and howls in the Treetops and then suddenly Is still. Late at night I wake And look out of the tent. The Clouds are rushing across the Sky and through them is tumbling The thin waning moon. Later All is quiet except for A faint whispering. I look Out. Great flakes of wet snow are Falling. Snowflakes are falling Into the dark flames of the Dying fire. In the morning the Pine boughs are sagging with snow, And the dogwood blossoms are Frozen, and the tender young Purple and citron oak leaves. ~Kenneth Rexroth “Snow” from The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth
Snow and then freezing rain fell for hours yesterday so we remain cloaked and iced and drifted this morning
~we appear more pristine than we are_
Underneath this chilly blanket we’re barely presentable, sleep-deprived, wrinkled and worn, all mud and mildew beneath.
~yet a thaw is coming~
Spring will rise from its snowy bed, lit from an inner fire that never burns out.
Through clouds like ashes from a burning bush, we turn aside to see God’s glory; our eyes carefully covered from the bright glaze of snow and ice.
We feel His flash of life as He passes by.
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If day after day I was caught inside this muffle and hush
I would notice how birches move with a lovely hum of spirits,
how falling snow is a privacy warm as the space for sleeping,
how radiant snow is a dream like leaving behind the body
and rising into that luminous place where sometimes you meet
the people you’ve lost. How silver branches scrawl their names
in tangled script against the white. How the curves and cheekbones
of all my loved ones appear in the polished marble of drifts. ~Kirsten Dierking “Shoveling Snow” from Northern Oracle.
These sub-zero January nights linger long, beginning early and lasting late. I find myself stuck in an insistent winter, pushing through the snowdrifts.
A wintry soul can be a cold and empty place.
I appeal to my Creator who knows my struggle. He asks me to keep my promises because He keeps His promises. His buds of hope and light and warmth still grace my bare branches.
He brings me out of the dark, into the freshness of a snowy dawn, to finish what He brought me here to do.
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If you have seen the snow under the lamppost piled up like a white beaver hat on the picnic table or somewhere slowly falling into the brook to be swallowed by water, then you have seen beauty and know it for its transience. And if you have gone out in the snow for only the pleasure of walking barely protected from the galaxies, the flakes settling on your parka like the dust from just-born stars, the cold waking you as if from long sleeping, then you can understand how, more often than not, truth is found in silence, how the natural world comes to you if you go out to meet it, its icy ditches filled with dead weeds, its vacant birdhouses, and dens full of the sleeping. But this is the slowed down season held fast by darkness and if no one comes to keep you company then keep watch over your own solitude. In that stillness, you will learn with your whole body the significance of cold and the night, which is otherwise always eluding you. ~Patricia Fargnoli “Winter Grace” from Hallowed
Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth’s superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind — ~Emily Dickinson(1263)
If the truth is revealed all at once, I tend to hide from it.
Sometimes I need to see it emerge slowly and silently, a gentle dawning as if a rising sun is transforming night to day. If truth is an illuminating back drop reflecting onto my life, I am less likely to be blinded by its brilliance.
Instead it transforms me, dazzled and dazed.
I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind but now I see.
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Today is one of those excellent January partly cloudies in which light chooses an unexpected part of the landscape to trick out in gilt, and then the shadow sweeps it away. You know you’re alive. You take huge steps, trying to feel the planet’s roundness arc between your feet. ~Annie Dillard from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
After years of rarely paying attention, too busy with work or household or barnyard tasks needing doing, I realized only a finite number of sunrises and sunsets are left to me.
I don’t want to miss them, so now I stop, take a deep breath and feel lucky to be alive, a witness to that moment.
My feet are planted on the ground beneath me. My face feels the light from above, then a shadow sweeps it away, just for now, not forever.
Sometimes sunrises and sunsets are plain and gray, just as I am, but there are days lit from above and beneath with a fire that ignites across the sky.
I too am engulfed for a moment or two, until sun or shadow sweeps me away, transfixed and transformed, yet forever grateful for the moment of light.
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The cold has the philosophical value of reminding men that the universe does not love us…cold is our ancient companion. To return back indoors after exposure to the bitter, inimical, implacable cold is to experience gratitude for the shelters of civilization, for the islands of warmth that life creates. ~John Updike from “The Cold”in Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. ~Robert Frost “Fire and Ice“
One day, the scientists tell us, every star in the universe will burn out, the galaxies gradually blackening until
The last light flares and falls returning all to darkness where it will remain until the end of what we have come
to think of as time. But even in the dark, time would go on, bold in its black cloak, no shade, no shadow,
only the onward motion of movement, which is what time, if it exists at all, really is: the absence of reversal, the sheer
impossibility of that final fire dying into itself, dragging the day deep into what it no longer is,
bowing only to rise into the other, into a shining the heavens were commanded to host, the entire
always poised between the gravity of upward and downward, like the energy of a star itself constantly balanced between
its weight straining to crush its core and the heat of that same core heaving it outward, as though what destroys
redeems, what collapses also radiates, not unlike this life, Love, which we are traveling through at such
an astonishing speed, entire galaxies racing past, universes, it as if we are watching time itself drift
into the cosmos, like a spinning wall of images alrealdy gone, and I realize most of what we know
we can’t see, like the birdsong overheard or the women in China building iPhones or the men picking
strawberries in the early dawn or even sleeping sons in the other room who will wake up and ask
for their light sabers. Death will come for us so fast we will never be able to outrun it,
no matter how fast we travel or how heavily we arm ourselves against the invisible,
which is what I’m thinking, Love, even though the iron in the blood that keeps you alive was born from a hard
star-death somewhere in the past that is also the future, and what I mean is to say that I am so lucky
to be living with you in this brief moment of light before everything goes dark. ~Dean Rader“Still Life with Gratitude”
This week has been a good reminder of our helplessness and need for one another in the face of single digit temperatures with sub-zero windchills.
This is the kind of cold that tries men’s souls and frail bodies. This is “kill the bugs and the allergens” cold tries to balance out the ecosystem as well as our internal emotional and physical thermostats.
Chill like this descends unbidden from the Arctic, blasting through the thickest layers of clothing, sneaking through drafty doors and windows, and freezing pipes not left dripping. It leaves no one untouched and unbitten with universal freezer burn.
A bitter cold snap ensures even the most determined unhoused “living in the woods” individualists must become companionable or freeze to death, necessitating temporary shelter indoors with others for survival.
It sometimes means forced companionship with those we would ordinarily avoid, with whom we have little in common, with whom we disagree and even quarrel, with whom sharing a hug or snuggling for warmth would be unimaginable.
Our whole nation is in just such a temperamental and political cold snap today, so terribly and bitterly divided. If we don’t come in out of the cold, we each will perish alone. It is time to be grateful we have each other during these difficult times, ancient and uneasy companions that we are.
At least we might generate some heat by civilly discussing the issues we all face. The risk is letting disagreements get so out of control that nothing is left but smoke and ashes from the incineration.
Somewhere there must be middle ground: perhaps we can share sanctuary from the bitter cold through the warmth of a mutually well-tended and companionable hearth.
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I have grown tired of the moon, tired of its look of astonish- ment, the blue ice of its gaze, its arrivals and departures, of the way it gathers lovers and loners under its invisible wings, failing to distinguish between them.
I have grown tired of so much that used to entrance me, tired of watching cloud shadows pass over sunlit grass, of seeing swans glide back and forth across the lake, of peering into the dark,hoping to find an image of a self as yet unborn.
Let plainness enter the eye, plainness like the table on which nothing is set, like a table that is not yet even a table. ~Mark Strand “Nocturne of the Poet Who Loved the Moon” from Almost Invisible
I’m only 24 hours into a week-long winter northeaster blow with sub-zero windchills. Already I want to hang up my Carhartts and retire my Muck Boots and toss my work gloves for a warmer easier life somewhere else.
This is just plain hard being a farmer. I feel like I’m losing my bona fides as a tough-as-nails rural person.
Nothing that entrances me about living on a farm in temperate weather is remotely attractive now. Windstorms like this mean I worry our power will go out, the generator won’t work, the water will freeze up and we’ll fall and break bones … and, and, and…
So many fourth dimensional worries, whining, and weariness to spare.
What I seem to forget is that the generations of tough people I descend from made it through far worse than this. They didn’t do it as a hobby, like us; it was their livelihood. Trees were felled and sawed to become tables and furniture and fences and roofs and walls of houses and barns. Animals gave milk and meat and fields yielded grain and hay and gardens and orchards grew enough to store for winter food.
A few days of winter misery is a small price to pay for that kind of sustainability.
Let the plainness of the past inspire the plain hard work needed today and over the next few days.
It is worth doing it without complaining because it is the plain hard work needed. It always has been.
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