At dawn last Friday, the mercury dipped below zero on the kitchen thermometer for the first time this winter. I didn’t really need to report that fact to Kate. She had ventured into the arctic “cold end” of the house first and was hunched before the wood stove piling twigs upon a fragile flame. The world was in a deep freeze, locked up, and hardened into stillness — a two-degrees-below-stillness that speaks more directly to our awareness than any thermometer. It was cold.
We may think about hard freezes in terms of temperature, but we experience them in terms of water. It is water, after all, that freezes. It is water that hardens the landscape, from the ice on the lakes to the tiny frozen carcasses of last summer’s katydids. It is the water in our bodies that would freeze us solid if weren’t for our houses and our home fires.
The archeology of our brush pile recounts yard work and garden projects that stretch back six years to when we bought our place. We’ve been thinking about getting someone with a wood chipper to come around this spring to give us a fresh start and to leave us with a carpet of mulch beneath a stand of spruce trees where some new undergrowth is taking hold in the thick bed of needles there.
Landscaping projects last summer gave the pile new prominence under the spruces. It has risen into view from behind a stonewall on buttresses of pruned rhododendron branches, fallen tree limbs, and rotted fence rails. And now its crowing glory is this year’s Christmas tree with its entourage of wreaths.
It’s an unsightly mess, but we are reluctant to clean it up because it happens to be the most valuable part of our property to the community of critters who share our address. It is riddled with the passageways and redoubts of mice, chipmunks, squirrels, and even a few transient opossums and skunks. It is safe haven for the lower links in the food chain seeking refuge from hawks, owls, and coyotes. And it is well stocked.
This week started with a New Year’s Day — the day we greet at midnight by plucking at the endless string of time to make it sing “Auld Lang Syne.” As the champagne bubbles rose to our lips when we took “a cup of kindness yet,” past and future were knit together in a toast to better days ahead. Just like the good old days.
And in this wallowing between past and future, the present is nearly forgotten, but for the fleeting kisses that attend that brief moment when the calendar circles back on itself to touch nose to tail. The past thins and dims in our memory, and the future always keeps its secrets. But sometimes it seems the present is the truly elusive part of the time equation. The present moment is the place we never are as we preoccupy ourselves with nostalgia or regrets, hopes or fears.
At dawn on New Year’s Day, as the exhausted revelry of the night began its own descent into memory, the present moment showed up, right on time, in the form of a bundle of burning energy — not the rising sun. I’m talking about the chickadee.
