Simple Gifts

Sixty-two days in, and I freely admit, I'm weary of Winter.

The high temperature on November 30 was 54 degrees. The high on December first was 21, a temperature only rarely reached since. December 2010 was the coldest December in Pocahontas County's recorded history.

And then came the snowdrifts of January. Plans were repeatedly canceled and appointments postponed and all manner of projects put on-hold as Mother Nature demanded my full attention. When she gets into one of these snowy-blowy moods, only a fool ignores her. Trust me, Winter on Top of Allegheny suffers no fools.

Winter in the northern hemisphere is officially defined as the period of time between the Winter Solstice (December 21) and the Vernal Equinox (March 21). In addition to being the coldest time of year, it is also, as a kind of hey, let's get all the bad stuff out of the way at once bonus, marked by the shortest days and longest nights! No wonder black bears spend most of it sleeping. Why the heck not?

So, in purely calendrical terms, Winter will be half-over on February fourth. However, since Winter actually began on December first, I'm choosing to think of it as a little more than two-thirds over. Neat trick, huh? Yep. When you spend a lot of time alone on an Allegheny ridge-top, a snow-struck mind uses any trick it can wrap itself around. Ahem. And, just to be clear, the manifest fact that actual Winter weather may come and go well past March 21 is, well, not something I'm prepared to consider right now. So, be a mensch, would you? Don't remind me. Or if you simply must remind me, come up here and do it in person. I’ve got soup!

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, on occasion, every-so-often over these past 62 days, I’ve felt myself yearning forward. Leaning into the future as into a strong headwind. Staring squinty-eyed at Spring as if it were a reachable mirage just there, right over there, past the funnel-cloud snow devils whipping up and down the ridge.

As someone who professes to value living in the present, Allegheny Winter truly challenges me to walk the talk.

Nearly every morning she throws this gauntlet: “Be here, now.” And not just when it’s easy. Not just on those rare days when the sun shines in a Caribbean blue sky and the snow sparkles like Swarovski crystal, those days when the beauty of this place enters my blood, rushes through me, fills me with the knowingness of true love.

But on the other days. The days I’d take a one-way trip to the Caribbean and never look back. True love? Yeah, right.

Those are the days Winter grabs my chin in her icy fingers and blows her frigid breath in my face: “Stay with me.” Her voice has a rather unfortunate, snakelike quality that, nonetheless, serves to focus my attention quite well. Such a command conveys a power not unlike that of Robert DeNiro’s character in the Meet the Fockers movies, when he points his index and middle fingers toward his own eyes and then toward Ben Stiller’s.

Some mornings I feel quite willing to salute. Other mornings I’d prefer a gesture just a wee bit less polite.

Either way, suffice it to say, Winter never fails to get my attention.

And it is my attention she never fails to reward. Always when I least expect it. Often, in fact, when I’ve damn near given up.

A bald eagle stands in the middle of the Old Pike just past Spencer’s Ridge. He looks my way, and then lifts off. Two massive flaps take him above the trees and away.

The copper-bright tail of a red-tailed hawk shines like metal captured in a fleeting ray of sunlight.

Chickadees fly from the feeder to the nearby conifers, where they disappear into the cave-like bower created by the lowest, snow-laden bows. Is this, perhaps, where these petite birds shelter at night, during the harshest winds?

Danny, Brightside’s resident nuthatch, hammers sunflower seeds into the cracks in the deck railing, gaining the better advantage from which to pry their innards.

I watch one and then another and then another junco put his feet together and hop backwards to pull snow off of seeds spilled from the feeder.

The Junco Hop.

Did I just see that? I do believe I did.

Winter is teaching me, she is.

No doubt about it, I'm a slow learner, and stubborn to boot.

But, slowly and surely, I'm learning how to unwrap her gifts.

Life Actually

I opened my eyes to a crème-colored sky. Shortcake infused with the faintest blush of strawberry pink. I blinked. The boar-bristle edge of the ridge across the valley appeared as if etched, each tree limb precisely carved and filled with black ink. I blinked again, my vision undiluted by snow or fog or cloud, and felt an upwelling of wonderment akin to what I experienced when I was 12, and walked outside wearing prescription lenses for the first time.

I sat up and looked out the window behind my bed.

After what had, in truth, been only days (although on certain days it surely felt like years!) since the sky dawned clear, my world appeared rendered in the miracle of High Definition. All fuzzy edges remade with Exact-o blade precision. The battleship gray of snow-storm and frozen-fog replaced with an Allegheny Mountain Winter’s true colors: white, black, amber and green.

True colors, shining through.

As I let my eyes take-in the crystalline ridge top scene just beyond the bedroom window, I remembered what Jake would say when he was little and we watched a black-and-white movie. “But it’s not black-and-white, it’s gray.” Back then I completely got what he was saying. Zebras are black-and-white. Penguins are black-and-white. Oreo cookies are black-and-white. The Number 2 pencil-drawn figures on the TV are not black-and-white. Silly Mommy.

But now, his words have a different sort of resonance. To live an Allegheny Mountain Winter is much like finding oneself in an old, “gray” movie.

Except on those rare occasions when it’s not.

This particular morning was one of those occasions. As in the modern “gray” movie, Pleasantville, I awakened to find the gray rubbed off, revealing a startling spectrum of life always present, regardless how hidden.

The deep, dark green of conifer boughs shown to full advantage topped by epaulets of sun-struck, sparkling snow. Amber grasses curved permanently against a wind that only this early morning had found somewhere else to blow. Arcs carved in the snow beneath each tasseled stalk belied their current ease with tattooed proof of the wind’s recent harassment. The sepia delicacy of dried yarrow blossoms, crocheted doilies set just-so among the sofa-like drifts by a fussbudget maiden aunt. A single yellow American Beech leaf, skittering across the brilliant white blanket as if pulled by an invisible string.

And birds. Yes, birds. Not huddled feather-by-wing near the porch feeder, but zooming about the yard! Flitting and flouncing and sassy-dancing. A jubilee of juncos, a cache of chickadees, and my resident singletons: Ted, the aloof, all-business tufted titmouse, and no-neck Danny, a nuthatch with enough personality for a nuthouse.

I raised the window behind the bed and leaned toward the fresh air, which lapped against my face like a splash of spring water. Sight. Sensation. And then, suddenly, sound. Smacking stips and buzzing tzeets and cackling chatters. The high, clear, keew of the juncos intermingled with the throaty, bossy "Are you talking to me?" dee-dee-dee of the chickadees.

Such a mid-winter symphony! And every bird looking so fine. Tail feathers a-zip-pop-snapping. Heads cocked, beaks open. I easily imagined the gleam in their eyes.

That same gleam was in mine.

Sure, another storm will come. The gray film will roll. Silence, save for the sound of wind, will prevail. Subtitle duty will, as usual, devolve to me. And I’ll have to create my own narrative. But this particular morning, I got a reminder wrapped in a reprieve.

Rub away the gray, just scratch the surface—a single scratch will do—and there it is: see it, feel it, hear it.

Life, actually.

Cleavability

Cleave, v: to split with or as with a sharp instrument; to accomplish by cutting; to pierce or penetrate; to adhere, cling or stick fast; to be faithful.


January 12 was one of the worst weather days I’ve ever experienced. And I don’t use that adjective lightly.

Here at Brightside, I’ve suffered through incessant Spring winds that have shaken this unshakable log home to its core. Winds for which “howling” is equivalent to “sighing,” and would be welcomed, ohso welcomed in exchange for the braying, bawling, scratchy pounding of the hounds of hell on every window and door. Winds I simply could not withstand, yet within which I was forced to crawl.

Even fiercer winds against which I could not push open the kitchen door.

Surely I exaggerate? I assure you, kind sir, I do not.

Howling winds? Pish-posh.

Lashing rain? Check. Scouring hail? Check. Punishing heat? Check. Bitter cold? Check. Darkness so utterly complete that I could not see the fingers of a hand pressed palm to nose? Yes, that, too. But only once.

In other words, I’ve had my share of scary, self-admonishing, pull-thyself-up-by-thy-bootlaces moments where “weather” is concerned.

Nonetheless, January 12 was different. Why?

In the sub-zero 40 mph wind, it wasn’t annoyance or discomfort that mattered. It wasn't a case of mind over matter, but rather the matter of life and death. Simply put: This kind of weather could kill me. And I knew it.

All day long, it was as if Winter herself were poking a long, bony finger in my chest, making damn certain I got the message. And trust me, I didn’t need to hear her whispered words to get the gist.

It started when I awoke, continued not just during, but both before and after my time plowing, and didn’t end when I trudged out, through a frigid, windborne snow-cloud, to turn off the generator at 10 pm. Returning to the house, I stopped for a moment and stood as a figurine in a shaken snow-globe. I was, quite honestly, awed to find myself in such a rarified atmosphere, with windblown flakes like diamond shavings upwelling around me, subsuming me. Again I thought of the draw of the deep sea, of falling off an underwater cliff, a sensation every scuba diver knows as equal parts sinking and rising. I looked to the light of the house and walked toward it. I thought of stories I’ve read about the warm-bath-like peace that accompanies the process of freezing.

As I knocked snow off my boots, and pulled the storm door closed behind me, I wondered: How do they know? Those who write of the so-called calm that attends a frozen death. How do they know what it feels like?

And without the benefit of goose-down jacket and Thinsulate-lined boots, without the bright fluorescent light to guide me, would I succumb to cold, just as at least one other person has done, right here on this very ridge top?

How long would I last out here, alone, in the insistent, swirling, icy darkness?

I shut-out the cold when I closed the door, but I took the questions to bed with me.

This weather claims residence in the marrow of my bones. Life simply does not get more intimate than this. This weather pierces, penetrates, and adheres. This weather cuts even as it sticks. It cleaves.

As I lay in bed, I saw again the snow-wake spilling back from the plow-blade as it cut through the pristine bank. The hypnotic fact of a froth of snow brought to life by the application of a sharp instrument. An instrument wielded by me.

Yes, it's beautiful. Beautiful in the way pulling carrots from the earth is beautiful. Killing the plant to eat the root. Destroying so that one might live. At least for one more day.

The analogy is more apt than you might think. The snowdrift, like hunger itself, may be quenched, quelched, held-back today, but it will return with the next wind. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the day after. Make no mistake, it will return. Today's plowing, like today's pulled and consumed carrot, has no meaning whatsoever in the future. It doesn't exist.

The thrill of being the first human to cleave a snowbank is as undeniable as it is indescribable. The knowledge that it will reassemble itself behind me is, well, perhaps the nature of Life Itself rendered in momentarily observable form.

And aren't I the lucky one to get to experience such cleavability first hand? Yes I am. I most certainly believe that I am.

In large part, perhaps the largest part, that's why I'm here.

I continue to encounter those who miss this hard, harsh fact of my reason for being, who insist on imagining solitary existence on a remote mountaintop in almost entirely romantic terms. Which is to say, they think of it as a kind of idealistic, quixotic quest, somehow abstracted from the realities of not just modern life, but life itself. One extended Little House on The Prairie vacation. Aw-shucks and Isn't that sweet.

Well, yeah, sure. It's mighty sweet, life without the hassles of television and telephone and utility companies and road maintenance and 911 service. Yeah, it's simpler, being entirely dependent on oneself.

But such simplicity comes at a price.

Every moment here, life cleaves close.

Home

"People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all costs to be so and against all opposition."

Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (Letter Seven, May 14, 1904)

I spent New Year's weekend back home in Memphis, where I grew up and married, and my son was born, where I lived for most of my life. In the far southwest corner of Tennessee, wedged up against the flat sides of Arkansas and Mississippi.

Memphis sits at the northern tip of the Mississippi delta, a remarkably flat, incredibly fertile alluvial plain between the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers. Indeed, Memphis has always seemed, in appearance as well as temperament, to belong more to the Magnolia State of Mississippi than to the rest of Tennessee.

This is a discontinuity I've addressed repeatedly in recent years when West Virginians, hearing that I'm from Tennessee, assume a mountain heritage as explanation for my residence on a mountaintop in the Allegheny Highlands. "Oh no, " I explain, "Memphis is not like the rest of the state. Its flat." More than one person has blinked at me in astonishment. "Sometimes I think I was born in the wrong place," I say with a shrug and a grin. Such an absurd comment often elicits the intended chuckle--but I don't actually believe what I'm saying. As poet Louis Simpson wrote: Destiny fits, always.

I belong here. I simply had to spend 30+ years somewhere else in order to realize it. Which is to say that although Memphis is, by virtually every obvious metric, just about as different from where I belong as a place can be, I know I couldn't be here if I hadn't been there first.

Memphis is where I learned to love wild places. As a child, I sought them out--such desire being bred in the bone, native to me, not taught--and found them wherever I could. Undeveloped lot. Untamed backyard. Railroad siding. Drainage ditch. Memphis is where I became a farmer. In a tiny backyard vegetable garden, shoe-spooned between a concrete drive and a privet hedge. Memphis is where trees became companions. Not fixed and immutable features of the city landscape, but cohorts on this journey whose successes were to be celebrated and set-backs mourned.

Memphis is where Nature became something I could not live without.

Memphis is also where I learned to accept that the wounds of opposition create the rawness of possibility. In ever-present conflict, there is a fertility of the possible, out of which anything imaginable might grow, bad or good.

As I flew in from my connection in Atlanta, I had my usual rush of conflicted feelings. Where Memphis and I are concerned there's always plenty to be conflicted about. From the socio-historical: endemic racism, urban sprawl, political incompetence; to the abjectly personal: Hey, I used to live here! And a bunch of people I love still do! But I gotta admit that what overwhelmed me, as I gazed out the window, what drove all the thought-phantoms away, were the trees.

Yes, of course, all the sharp lines and angles of human endeavor, all the insistent geometry of a city was present, but trees were present, too. Present in enough numbers to matter. To have not just a caucus, but a quorum, a vote, a voice.

Look at that! Trees!

"This place has a lot of oaks," I observed with pleasure the following day, as my mother and I drove about the city, visiting family and friends. The rusty-brown of tenacious red, pin and chestnut oak leaves caught and held my attention, drawing my gaze upward and away from the traffic, the lights, the immutable colors and sounds of a city.

Seeing the trees was like discovering a shared memory with an estranged lover. Yes, there was that. Better yet, there is that. Still. A reason for our connection. Living proof.

As a child, I loved to climb to the very top of an immense southern magnolia tree in our neighbor's yard. The smooth-wrinkly bark reminded me of elephant skin. The white blossoms looked like gigantic gardenias set atop thick shiny leaves bigger than both of my hands placed side-by-side. I was scared-safe, clinging to the tree trunk, swaying in a summer breeze, 30 feet up.

I don't recognize you, I thought, as we drove about town. As I noticed all the absent structures, replaced with new ones. The absent open spaces, filled. The asphalt, concrete, brick and mortar. I don't recognize you, I thought, but I know who you are.

Four days later, I walked out of the airport in Roanoke, a big city by local standards, by my standards. But no. Not Atlanta. Not Memphis. I walked out of the airport to a view, not of parking garages, not of buses pulled front-to-end, but of mountains. Delicate Virginia mountains, to be sure, but beautiful, nonetheless. And when I got to the car, I turned around, looked west, and boy-oh-boy did I smile!

That "kiss the ground" feeling? Well, once I was on US 220 and safely past Fincastle, I had it, big time. If I'd been driving my 10th grade boyfriend home in the Plymouth Volare with a plan toward finding a good place to dawdle, I couldn't have been more lit up with happy expectation.

"Home." I said it out loud, and with a chesty rumble. As if daring someone, anyone, to suggest I couldn't or shouldn't. Dare me not to, sucker. "I'm. Going. Home."

If Splendor, Mirth and Good Cheer are the three Greek "graces," then assuredly they all reside in a desired home, and with anyone who finds herself where she belongs. Regardless how incomprehensible such sense of belonging is to outsiders.

"You're goofy," my Mom offered, good-naturedly, when I reported how happy I was to be heading
 west on 220. Heading toward a snow cloud, and an off-grid cabin five miles up an un-plowed dirt road. A place a good two-hour drive from actual four-lane traffic, or anything approaching an actual mall. A place where there are no utilities, no TV, no land-line, and cellphones don't work. A place where my frozen garden will sleep soundly until mid-June.

A place where trees don't share the landscape, they dominate. At least for now. And destiny has marked me as witness.

Home. There's the home you're born into, and the home you choose. Sometimes they're the same. Sometimes not. If you get really lucky, the home you choose, chooses you back.

Lucky me.

Cold by Any Other Name

“It's cold out folks. Bone crushing cold. The kind of cold which will wrench the spirit out of a young man or forge it into steel.”
--John Corbett as “Chris” on Northern Exposure, 1992

“Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.”
--from Nature, by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

I’ve found myself staring out the window, any window, a lot this month.

Staring empty-minded into snowy murk that reminds me of nothing so much as a current of plankton-filled seawater. A current rushing past the window as it once rushed past my scuba mask. A current so close, a mere arm's length away, but far enough beyond the underwater cliff-top over which I floated to give me pause. Stop my progress, if only momentarily.

Out there, in the colorless abyss, a woman could lose her bearings.

This was the revealed secret at the heart of the water-current’s seductive force. And so, more than once, more than a dozen times in my scuba-diving years, I allowed myself to float forward into that powerful flow. Eyes focused through the plankton swirl to the impenetrable gloom, I allowed myself, if only for a few moments, to be taken.

Taken in. Taken over. Taken up by Nature. If only for a few moments, I untethered my self and let her go.

That was then.

This Allegheny mountain December, I stand at the storm door and trace my fingers along the ice crystals formed on the inside pane. Just beyond the glass, the snow-globe snow swirls, directionless and upended, glowing in the impenetrable gloom.

But I’m not taken in, not taken over. Despite my desire, despite the visions of Caribbean reef fish schooling in my head, I’m not taken up by Nature. Not today, no. Not right now. I remain quite tethered to my self and quite limited by my life on this side of the ice-sheathed door.

Why? Because its just too damn cold.

By which I mean frigid, gelid, polar and bleak. Cutting, raw and rimy. Nippy, snappy, frigorific (causing cold), frosty (devoid of warmth) and frore (frozen). At the very least, folks, its seriously shivery.

So, rather than floating forward into Nature's powerful flow, I pull back. I withdraw my fingers from the frozen glass. I shut the inner door. I stand by the fire and turn my face toward the window. I stare out, as if expecting against all empirical evidence the arrival of a too-long-absent lover. I am Marianne searching the horizon for Willoughby in Sense & Sensibility. Catherine waiting upon Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. Scarlett mooning after Ashley in Gone with the Wind. (Well, maybe that's a bit much. After all, it is only December!)

But isn't that the point? Only December. So early in our separation, mine from Nature, so soon this barrier of glass and wood come between us, and already, already, yes, I feel a heart-scouring loneliness no less potent than that of these fictional heroines.

After all, it was just last month that I plunged my hands into warm dirt and felt potatoes snug against my palms. A woman gets used to such things.

Staring out the window, I can't help but ask: How could you? How could you do this to me?

I watch juncos wiggle bird-sized notches in the snow atop the deck railing. They appear absolutely resolute in their commitment to persevere, come what may.

I, being human and Scarlett-like, am nowhere near so accepting.

As a gust of wind sends a raft of roof-snow careening into the birds, my only thought is profoundly parsimonious: How could you be so cold?

Cold. By which word I am referring not only to the absence of heat, but to the absence of sentiment. Make no mistake, there is a coldness to Nature that has as much to do with attitude as it does with temperature. There is an abruptness, an inexplicable withdrawal of obvious signs of affection that puts me in mind of a fickle lover, that causes me to gaze out the window in yearning contemplation of all the many whens and whys she is not about to answer--not now, not ever. There is an absolutism about her that shocks and offends my modern, delicate sensibilities and tempts me to rebellion. My every molecule demands an explanation.

As this long December draws to a close, I know I would be much better served by patience.

Patience is a curious concept. It is essentially, in my opinion, the capacity to endure. Patience is not the same thing as suffering, although it may often contain suffering. Patience is not the same thing as passivity or inaction, although it may require both. Patience is tolerance of unacceptable conditions tempered by the knowledge that better conditions can and likely will occur--but only if you refuse to check out of the scene. Patience is a state of active waiting for the moment to strike. Patience is a state of rapt attention. Wait and watch come from the same indo-european root, which means, essentially, to be awake.

The pace of Nature, it would seem, is the pace that adjusts--on the fly, at a wakeful moment's notice, as required. It neither pushes nor holds back. It is both the current and everything that enters the current. Nature is patience--whole and entire.

Which means, even when she's bitter cold, Nature contains me. And though she may see fit to withdraw her obvious signs of affection for a time, it's nothing personal. Really. It's just something she's gotta do.

I know this, I do. I just forget it sometimes.

This has been one hell of a cold-dark month.

I watch snow flakes blow horizontal across the deck. The snow-topped rail is a barrier beyond which all is milky-murk. Would that I could stand on that rail and cast off to float gently in the flake-tossed air over Hidden Valley and hear the stone-rush of Slabcamp Run.

Even now, inside my walls of glass and wood, I dare to hear the music. Do you?

I hear the song-promise of Spring, buried deep within those frozen notes.