Winter Dreaming
As I write, the cold rain turns to snow, then back to rain and to snow again, the temperature see-sawing, the falling water changing from liquid to slushy droplets to full-on geometrically miraculous flakes, then back to liquid again. I had hoped to ski into our Adirondack cabin this past weekend, but the woman I spoke with at the Long Lake, NY Park and Recreation department told me not to bother. They haven’t even brought the snowmobile groomers out on the trails, and going straight across the semi-frozen lake would be treacherous still due to the run of warm weather. This Connecticut slush was Adirondack snow, but certainly not enough to make it feel like winter there yet, though January nears its end.
One terrible thing about the unstoppable charge of global warming will be (is?) this transformation of winter into one vast, grey-cold seasonless season.
I love when snow makes short winter days brighter, the whole surface of the world reflective, monochrome, everything transformed into something elegant and simpler—the grays and blacks and whitecaps of the lake surface become a stretch of smooth white; all the different shades of green of maples and birches and spruce and beech, all the undergrowth of fern and scrub brush and wild thorny things become black etched lines set upon a white canvas. Stone walls, fallen trees, the browns of rotting leaves, the jagged edges of shattered stumps….all vanish into whiteness.
Many years ago in the midst of a strong, real winter in the Berkshires, I received a mysterious call from a friend who lived a few miles up the road. “Come now,” he said. “Drop everything and come now. And bring your skates.” There had been a good, hard New England snowfall, then a day or two of what we used to call “January thaw,” and then it had turned brutally cold, well below zero in a matter of hours, so all the snow had a sheen to it, a blinding, shimmering glaze. Ferg came rushing out the door of his lovely, old farmhouse when I arrived, his face aglow, wearing big, wool mittens, a thick hat, and his skates on right there in his driveway. “Put them on,” he said, as I pulled mine from the back seat of my car.
Soon we were skating on the snow, the surface hard enough nearly everywhere. It was just like a dream, gliding across fields, between the big maples and spruce, up knolls, down fast into dips, spinning, sliding backwards, pumping the edges in, making long, smooth parallel lines in the ice-crusted surface. We skated till our legs gave out, neither of us wanting it to ever stop, though already, as the sun rose higher, we started hitting softer spots where we broke through.
I reminded Ferg of that day when he visited me this past summer after too long an interval of not seeing him, and I was glad to have him verify it was not just a dream after all.
The rain has momentarily switched over to all snow coming down at a slant now, starting to gather a little on the upper cold edges of branches, momentarily white-still against the wet leaves before melting away.
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