Winter Words

Though I wrote this nearly a year ago, today it simply appeared on my screen to my surprise.  I imagine it was something bidding me to pick it up again, and so I did..

Today, I walked again.  I took a long walk along country roads past farmland and woods.  I walked on hips and knees that complained with each step.  I walked with arms that hung rigidly at my side between bent shoulders.  I walked and as I walked, I listened to the crunching of the snow under each footstep.  I walked head down, placing my feet carefully in the snow and ice.  I walked uphill and down until my legs warmed and relaxed and finally lent themselves to the work.  I walked until my arms swung loosely at my sides.  I walked until I raised my head to take in the landscape around me, the rolling fields and the stands of birch and sugar maple .

Today, at last, I breathed again.  I took in cautious sips of cold air as I stepped out into the Vermont winter.  I drew the tight, shallow, weak breaths of my city existence.  I let more air out than I let in.  My lungs protested from behind the bars of their ribbed cage.  I followed my breath in and out, counting as I inhaled and counting again as I exhaled.  I harnessed my breath.  I pulled on its reins and begged it to slow down.  I tamed it with repetition and focus.  I looked out across the hollows covered in snow and attempted to breath the entire view in.  As I did, my breath fell into the deep rhythm of the tides and lent itself to my work.  I breathed until my chest rose and ribs followed.  I drank in long breaths until the effort of it escaped in a weak cough.  The cough startled me and I laughed.  It was a tenuous laugh, a gasp really. Not a purposeful laugh.  I tested my laugh against the silent day, not wanting to wake the hay fields and hillsides from their season’s slumber beneath their white blanket.  I watched my breath in the cold air until I was sure they had not stirred, and laughed again.  The laugh turned into a hum.  A nonsense tune, a made up ditty buzzing between the lips.  The humming made me think of my dad and that, of course, made me think of a song.  So I tried a song.  Quietly singing under my breath.  Then gaining strength.  Finally singing under, over and around my breath…singing with my breath until I was singing as a way of breathing. And I sang and hummed and breathed all the way back to this home away from home.

Today, I drank.  I drank water with lemon and hot jasmine tea.  I drank coffee with breakfast laced with maple syrup and softened with cream.  I drank a second cup black.  I drank more water, iced and then lukewarm.  I drank red wine in long languid sips and let it pool in my mouth before swallowing.  The drinking lent itself to the work without practice or effort .

Today, I slept again.  A sleep unlike the sleep of the last decade.  I fell asleep like the old bent alders in our woods fall under the weight of rain and snow.  I slept without stirring.  I did not wrestle with the blankets or pummel the pillows.  I did not find my arms wrapped crookedly under me.  I did not stir to the sounds of whatever critters pitter-pattered past my window, evidenced only by their tracks the next morning.  In my sleep, I did not dream or at least, I did not recall.  I slept with abandon and without care, the sleep of an infant.  I slept and my ears opened before my eyes, as it should be.  And when I woke, I did not care to retreat to sleep again.

Today, I slept and drank and sang again. Today, I breathed and walked again.  Today, I wrote again. And this is what I wrote…

Like many stories do, this one begins at its end.  I am walking.  Everything is sleeping under a blanket of snow.  There are farmhouses that dot the fields around me and stands of sugar maple and birch.  Birch trees remind me of my family home. Three grow straight skyward outside our front door in Michigan.  As kids, my sister and I would peel the papery bark and write secret messages in lemon juice with our fingers, holding them above the toaster later to watch the letters emerge.  The birches are fitting, as I have come here to write.  I have traveled back in time in a way, to a place of my past to begin the telling of my story.  Or rather, my story wrapped in the stories I really wish to tell, the animal’s stories.  My life seems to be edging toward another one of its peaks.  I arrived in Boston early in the morning and started the drive to Vermont.  Boston is an old stomping ground, a familiar face if I look long enough behind the paintbrush of age.  I head north on 93 and a slow smile emerges when I see the Welcome to New Hampshire road sign and the familiar granite face on the outline of the state; the Old Man in the Mountain.  Live Free or Die the sign proclaims, about the best motto I can imagine.  The highway narrows to a four-lane road and I pull into one of the many small towns that dot the New England countryside.  There is gas in Goffstown and then the one-lane meandering road that follows alongside one of the best fly-fishing rivers in the east. Today I have the road and the river to myself it seems. There is one stop I must make between towns, on this river at the site of an old fairgrounds.  The grandstand is still standing in good shape, the fences around the show rings have been replaced recently and I recognize the path that leads down into the woods and out onto the cross-country riding course.  I park and walk down to the river edge and look up at the hill across the way.  I can just make out another path, wider than a trail but too narrow for a car.  We used to ride our horses up and down that path to get from the barn to the fairgrounds.  I can’t see the barn from here and I can no longer remember which tree I swore to remember in case I ever needed to find my way back again.  They all look the same.  But I know he is there, buried deep down beneath the snow and earth and the roots. Barnstormer, my horse from another lifetime.  I can picture his long red face the first time I met him, his ears pinned flat against his head and nose wrinkled.  What an angry little man he was then, the equine equivalent of Napolean.  How affectionate he became over time. All he needed was space and a job and one person.  My riding trainer knew that when she brought him home those many years ago, against protests from myself and others.  She provided the space and I provided the job and he chose the person.  Thankfully, it was me.  I turn back while the memories are still sweet and in my mind’s eye we are still riding the trails and jumping everything in sight and I haven’t time yet to think about the end when your little legs could no longer carry you and we walked you to this hill on a sun filled day and a belly full of carrots and laid you to rest.  I have more stops to make.  When I arrive into the little center of New Boston, I find it practically unchanged.  Twenty-five years have only worn the wood floors of the local grocery down a bit more.  Coffee still waits in a pot on the counter and three older men sit in the window seat looking out at the grey day.  For all I know, they are the same old men.  The bank is still on the corner across from the white church with its steeple and clerestory window.  I used to ride my horse down the hill and hand my paycheck to the teller through the drive through window.  Just up the hill, I see the porch of the farmhouse where we lived, only now it is a sprawling dental office with a fresh coat of paint.  But the barns are still there and I park and walk across the crust of snow to peer inside the windows.  The stalls are empty but still standing, filled now with lumber and other equipment I suppose.  Farther up the road is my friend’s new barn.  When her father sold the farmhouse and land, she and her husband Mark purchased 40 acres of land covered in apples trees, hayfields and an enormous horse barn.  I head there next.  We have not seen one another in over two decades, Gretchen and I.  She is a soul sister.  She was my riding teacher, my employer, my roommate, my friend all at once.  She walks out of her aisleway on the way to teach a lesson in the arena and sees me beside the car, pulling a scarf around my neck against the chill, they are high on a hill and the wind is up.  Time slips away and it is as if 25 years were 25 minutes.  We hug and fall into conversation as if we had never parted.  She teaches while I watch the two young girls adeptly pilot their horses over the course of jumps.  She tells them, “Remember when we went to Deerfield Fair last year and I showed you the picture on the wall of Barnstormer winning the Vanbuskirk Classic? This is the rider I was telling you about” and she thrusts a thumb in my direction. I am transported in my mind to that September day when my little red horse and I galloped to victory in the jumper class, beating Gretchen and her massive grey gelding Oberon by a tenth of a second.

We play with the dogs for a bit, a beagle with a long face and two hounds.  She shows me one horse after another down the long aisleway. I help her clean stalls and take horses out the fields that surround her little kingdom and we go to lunch.  When I have to leave, we hug long and hard and of course, as people do, we promise not to wait another 25 years to do it again.  I invite her to Seattle to visit the farm knowing she will probably never make it and we grin.  I wander the remaining miles in a warmth that only a shared love can bring and when I arrive at the white farmhouse, it is getting dark.  But inside it is warm and there is dinner waiting.  I am the only guest tonight and when I lay down in the bed in my room, I feel the old house settle down around me in my dreams.

The beauty of arriving in the dark is the discovery that awaits you in the morning. Through the night, the snow has fallen. It lies spread across the farmland fields like an unmarked page on the platen, silently awaiting the first letters to strike on its smooth face. In a few hours, its surface will be pocked with footsteps, long scars trenching across it from the blades of shovels, wrinkles appearing from the tread of tires. In this moment, however, it is unspent, its own, unused. Mine alone the awesome task of initiation. Do I initiate its demise with a single step? Or stoop to gently usher it out of its repose with a sweep of my mittened hand? Or do I protect its virginity to the last possible moment? Shall I stand guard from my perch at the window, praying for its purity to remain, wishing fervently in the midst of the morning calm for all things to remain unchanged? Or succumb to a desirous ruination? I do the only sensible thing, wisdom passed from sisters.  I dress and step out into the cold.  I turn my back on its whiteness, fall backward onto its downy expanse, flail arms and legs in ecstasy and give birth to the day’s first snow angel.