The Winter That Never Ended

Yesterday, I put on my shoes and a jacket and mumbled, "Gotta go outside so I can write about it later." I sat on the garden swing for a half-hour, and a couple of goldfinches fought over the remaining seeds in the feeder on the pussywillow tree.

"What am I going to write about?" I asked them. It seems I've reached that point of the semester when assignments are burdens, books are dead weights with print that bounces off the surface of my memory. Ideas are fleeting.

When we moved in here, the house was on a corner of two roads. About ten years ago, a new (third) road was put in between my house and my neighbors', setting my family's property on a peninsula of grass and giving access to the backhoes that dug up the woods and planted suburban fake-estates in its place.

Behind me, beyond the fence along the new road, the sound of cars blended with the sound of the wind. The gray oily clouds gnashed and whirrled in the sky. Last week, I could hear the grass growing as spring rainwater trickled into the cracks in our clay soil. Yesterday, I just sat there getting cold.

"What am I going to write about?"

I kicked at the mulch under the garden swing and noticed the trees on the hill across the hollow. They're just as stick-y and dark as they've been all winter, but it looked like someone had spilled a little white and a little red on their branches. A little cloud of color. A smudge on my glasses.

The color of spring is yellow. Yellow crocuses, yellow daffodils, yellow buds on the bush by the garden shed that I can't identify. Yellow pollen on the pussywillow, yellow goldfinches.

A few months ago, I dreaded the spring. I couldn't conceive of a bright and cheery season when I was so sad. But I'm sick of being sad. I'm sick of cold winds and heavy skies. I want the weather to pick me up and carry me away from grief.

I left the swing, checked out the baby daffodils behind the garden shed, peeked in on the redbud tree my mom and I planted a couple weeks ago, and returned to the house.

An hour later, it started to snow.


:30°F:
:dark and cloudy sky:

One Small Step

On Saturday afternoon, my mom and I took a fine and fancy ramble through the yard, bouncing ideas off one another for extending the prettyish sort of little wilderness behind the garden shed, and observing which creatures of the wild have been meeting up on our property. In ankle-deep snow, we discovered, much to our delight, deer tracks! It looked as though a small family had come through, blending in their trails with those of the rabbits, the juncos, and the wookiee.

That night, I wrapped myself in the red and black checkered jacket that hangs by the back door and walked the driveway, examining the shadows of the trees, which lay on the white snow: silent, bold, black lines cast by the bright silver moon.

I woke up Sunday morning to a brown world. As we adjusted our choir robes before the service, we all asked each other what happened to the snow. Several inches had disappeared overnight. I was glad I had taken the time to go explore the trees' shadows against the white canvas of our yard the night before. It's possible that winter has left us until December.

Of course, it's possible that this is a deceptive thaw. In any case, the slight rise in temperature yesterday encouraged me to spend as much of daylight as I could outside. The ankle-deep snow had become ankle-deep mud, the area around the compost bin soggiest of all.

And then last night, I braved whatever wilderness comes out after sundown, and I took a brief, but beautiful stroll around the back of the garden shed, between the vegetable garden and the grapevine, around the deck, and back to the backdoor.

If the neighbors aren't already talking, they will be now. "Well, her mother says she's living at home while she's in grad school," they're saying to one another, "but have you seen the way she wanders the yard at all hours? I think grad school's their little language for something else."

I don't care. The night was too inviting. The moon lit my way better than any flashlight. The mud squashed gratifyingly into the tread of my boots. The weather is still cool enough to keep most animals in hibernation, but a close call with a skunk last summer kept my senses sharpened nevertheless. The rustle of leaves around the strawberry plants encouraged me to hurry a little faster toward the house. Before I began shivering inside my grandpa's old hunting jacket, I stood on the deck, just me and the moonlight, staring into the sky.

:clear night skies:
:31° F:

Quo Vadis?

On Thursday, the temperature rose about twenty degrees (making it just a hair above freezing), and the setting sun knocked on the living room window and asked me to come out and play. I bundled up, and my cat and I went out to see what we could see.

A few days earlier, we had gotten another coating of ice, and shortly after that, about a half-inch of snow. The wind had died down for a short time, and the end result was a beautiful splatter of animal footprints, all frozen in time like so many fossils.

Among them, as far as I could identify, were juncos and blue jays, whose prints centered on the patio and under birdfeeders; the wookiee (my cat), whose larger-than-average footprints look like a small dog’s patrolling every corner of our yard; rabbits, who remain fully hidden during the day, but evidently scuttle around the yard when no one’s looking; and squirrels.

The squirrels took me a while to identify, because they were in little clusters of four, each cluster spaced anywhere from 6 to 12 inches apart. I suppose they must have hopped. Or maybe they weren’t squirrel prints after all.

In any case, as the wookiee and I wandered around the yard, following footprints and chasing each other across the smooth drifts of snow, I turned around and traced with my eyes just where I had gone that evening.

I saw my footprints to the mailbox and back to the patio, to the garden swing and around the back of the tool shed, a group of bootprints where I had stooped to examine the squirrel prints under the pussywillow, and a line of footprints smashed through the icy layer parallel to the wookiee’s when I chased him back to the house.

The snow makes it clear where we’ve been. What it doesn’t as effectively reveal is where we’re going.

Quo vadis? Wohin gehst du? Where are you going? In whichever language, it’s a valid question. Our footprints, whether traced in snow, in carbon, or even in emotion, will tell a candid story about us when we’re gone. If we choose carefully the direction we’re heading now, our footprints will leave a valuable path for the ones to follow.