Snow drops

South of here, winter was piling on, adding another foot of snow to mid-Atlantic states that cried uncle weeks ago. It was snowing here, too – hard at times. But on a foray into the worst of it last Friday, carrying trash from the house to the barn, I felt the season slip.

Winter in New England is brawny and bare knuckled, but its reputation stands firmly on January and February. In March the season can put on a furious show, but this is the month it goes weak in the knees. Daylight Savings Time and the vernal equinox will administer a technical knock out in a couple of weeks, but standing there last week in a white-out squall, I could feel that for this year, winter’s cause is lost.

It was both warm and wet, and the road out front was black. Heat in the asphalt pushed back against the snowstorm and was winning. Even the least of living things were pushing back. Tender green shoots of snowdrops raised tight translucent buds like clenched fists through the snow. The Lenten rose was forming new blossoms beneath a layer of ice. And olive drab finches were pushing gold from the alchemy of their little electric hearts up through the down on their breasts.

When a winter storm hits us with thousand-mile momentum, as happened Wednesday, the snow descends on the bias, ripping across the grain of gravity, angling past the brims of our hats to slap us in the face. The affront drives most sensible people inside. And through the window we watch the all-consuming storm slowly erase the landscape until almost nothing is left on the blank white pages of its reductive art – nothing except the trees.

With leeward bark black with wetness, trees manage to etch a persistent identity even in the worst of winter storms. These stalwarts endure to define for us a horizon, over which the end of this particular hardship will come. This is true for all trees except white birches.

In mid-winter, white birches unfurl curlicues of papery bark, feathering their edges into the white surroundings. In a storm, they are like ghosts waving hankies, bidding adieu to the world’s solidity. They would be invisible but for the scars of knots and fissures that stand out on their bark like the black caps of chickadees, who normally grace their thin branches but have taken refuge from the storm in hedges and hemlocks.

When the storm moves on to be swallowed by the sea, we head back out with shovels to help the world regain its definition. And the chickadees return to their perches in birches to sit for another month or two, considering the utility of white paper curlicues for the construction of a nest.

The Second Day Of The Year The day we were officially released from “the holidays” this year bore the date 01/ 02/ 2010 – a numerical palindrome that defied direction by simultaneously coming and going. The day itself, a Saturday, was quite pleasant precisely because of its lack of direction. It required nothing of us. No early rising, no early retiring. No traditions to keep, no pressure to innovate. The future would be delayed a couple of days because it was snowing.

On the back side of a nor’easter that pummeled Maine, we were spared its severest blows. Yet the storm did a fair amount of bobbing, weaving and backpedaling, so the big dust-up in Vacationland settled down on us in a light snow carried on heavy north winds.

Across fields and farm ponds, the wind laid down snow and then picked it up again, sometimes acres at a time, as if it had been stowed momentarily in reserve for use elsewhere. The up and down snowing was simultaneously coming and going. Confounded ground-feeding juncos had to navigate to their earthbound meals through skeins of snow twisting skyward from form to formlessness, like ghosts freed from their marbled cemeteries.

On the second day of the year, winter acted as if it owned 2010 by freezing the future in place. But beneath the snow and the farm pond ice, beneath clear black water and blankets of mud, sleeping turtles dreamed of April.

Watching the great commercial apparatus of the Christmas holiday collapse in on itself in the whimpering supplication of January “sales events” brings a perverse pleasure to me. I don’t think anyone in their maturity finds true satisfaction in the frantic churn of consumer goods at Christmastime, but the process particularly wears on me as I grow older. Outside the enchanted snow globe of childhood imagination, Christmas can be a trifle glaring, so I am always happy to receive January’s invitation to move ahead to something new.
These dark days and weeks following the winter solstice are made for seekers. It is the nature of darkness to sharpen the eye and whet the appetite for light. We scan the horizon for something, anything, to leaven the weight of the winter night.
This year, I was lucky and received a gleaming gift straight from the arctic circle thanks to the sharp eyes of my friend Dottie Evans. Dottie called me on the shortest day of the year to say that she was pretty sure she had seen a small flock of snow buntings on her daily dog-walking trek up to the high field at Fairfield Hills. In an hour or two, I was up in the field myself, eyes up, scanning the horizon for this rare visitor from the north. I should have looked down.

March is here, so get ready for the month’s inevitable struggle with its dual winter/spring, lion/lamb personality. February laid down a blanket of new snow for its successor’s grand entrance on Thursday, and the new month won’t take long to put its own signature on the landscape, written large in slush and mud.

We haven’t had that much snow this year, so I am resolved to enjoy what little of it we still have coming. Of course at this time of year we are all rooting for the March lamb, which can seem like an underdog in these first days of the month. But after the vernal equinox on the 21st, we know the old March lion will lose its wind and lie down with that lamb in surrender.

Kate and I stayed up as late we could Sunday night to watch the Academy Awards, but ran out of steam somewhere in the thicket of awards for technical achievement, sound, art direction, and animation, so we let the Tivo take over our viewing duties and went to bed. It would all be in the paper in the morning anyway.