The Deep Freeze

I never want to read or write descriptions of nature, but to skip some mention of this long winter up here would be like talking about wedding guests and not the wedding.  It has been omnipresent, permeating every blog.  But how do you make a marble landscape and eternal freeze, now creeping into March, interesting? It's like being locked for two months in a gallery of black and white photographs.

This is the winter of my childhood, which was always full of snow, long lasting and cold.  But it was fun.  Skiing, skating, building forts and snowmen.  When we started coming up here, this was one of the draws -- a return to winter sport, so right at the beginning I bought the cross-country skis and the skates. Most of the winters, however, have been disappointing, dreary warmish things testifying to the Change.

Early in January, though, I became encouraged.  The pond froze up enough to skate on one day, but the groaning and the long cracks made me nervous, so I decided to wait.  Then a week or so later, a first gesture of downy snow covered the ice but brought me out for a nice little ski trudge around Dave's pond.  Almost perfect.  The weather warmed up the next day, however, and my skis would have become foot barbells from snow sludge sticking to them. Haven't been on them since. Then it came. Nearly three feet in two days. Great soft furry stuff but too deep to ski, and of course the pond's ice had disappeared for the season.  A few fast days of heat, and the snow squatted down by half.  The heavy snow crawled down the barn roof and hung off in great slaps, drip drip dripping onto the sidewalk by our apartment: lakes during the day and deadly rinks at night. Then the constant freeze, which is with us still. The fringe of ice hovering off the roof threatens like a bunch of fists but doesn't drip.  The yards, the hills are still burdened with snow, but gleam like stone and are unplayable.  

Here are this winter's necessaries: 

•   A car front-seat ass warmer. How did Northern driving humans live without this for so many years?  
• Heated gloves.  My fingertips freeze easily, maybe residual frostbite from early years, or just decrepitude.  Michael bought me jet-black heated gloves, with batteries stored in the wrists.  I feel like Robocop or Darth, They will probably give me hand cancer, but I don't care.  They are fabulous. 
• As mentioned in a previous blog, my LL Bean flannel nightgown.
• Snow shoes.  I bought two pair so that Michael and I could share something during the winter, since he doesn't ski or skate. Snow was too deep and soft for them, but after it crusted up, they turned out to be the only method of traversing the lawn.  Michael was able to stride up a huge icy bulldozed heap next to the driveway and clear out the bird feeder rope and pulley.
•   Birdfeeder.  The guys outside the kitchen window seem oblivious to the cold and cheer me up every morning: least flycatcher, tree sparrow, tufted titmouse, house finch, cardinal, chickadee, slate colored junco, red bellied woodpecker. 

We picked up Bonden's ashes yesterday and today we drove to New York to check on our apartment, which is being tarted up for sale.  The painters were there.  Our beloved debris of twenty-five years, under protective plastic sheeting, looked like shards and bones from an archeological dig. The bathroom sink is in our bedroom. Mirrors lean against the wall in the living room.  Michael paid the painters. I went to the bank, got some cash, and we drove back to Hudson. Manhattan had very little memory of snow but it rose like a line graph on the drive home.  On the way, I checked the long-term forecast for Hudson on my phone, which predicted nothing but daily temperatures in the teens and single digits at night.  Oh yeah, three to six inches of snow on Tuesday.

When we got to the barn, I stepped across the plywood board that serves as a moat to our steps under the killer ice fringe, and, although it was only four in the afternoon, I crawled under the covers of my bed and put myself into a fetal position, with Killick curled up in the crevasse formed by my knees. We both slept.

I have always claimed that winter ends on my birthday, April 18, and it invariably does. That day typically marks the end of winter's meal, leaving a dreary tablecloth of earth, stained with mud and crumby with dried sticks and leaves and frosty tufts of hard ground.  One shouldn't look for spring before that date.