Winter

The freezing temperatures soon give way to the first snowfall of the season, and, though you know your day’s chores are made more difficult by the snow, you cannot ignore the feeling of serenity the soft white blanket gives.  You watch the bird feeders as you have so many times before, never tiring of the comings and goings of the various winged creatures flitting like feathered gems in the bare tree branches.  It’s the little brown wren flitting around your porch, its head tilted inquisitively as it searches your empty flowerpots for something edible.  This wren reminds you of one of your grandfather’s favorite stories of watching a wren family on his porch as a boy—a wren family whose nest was conveniently located in the pocket of the coveralls his father had left hanging just under the porch’s awning.  The wren leaves tiny, mischievous tracks in the snow blown on your porch, and you’re surprised to find your cheeks are damp at the poignant simplicity of the memory.

It’s the frigid stillness when the evening’s chores are done.  When you were young, you would steal a few moments between the end of chores and the beginning of dinner to hide yourself in the old green wooden swing on the side porch.  You’d position yourself out of the path of light pouring from the kitchen window, and you remained silent as your siblings kicked their boots off and stomped the hay out of the folds of their pants (if they remembered) before going inside.  The cold began seeping into your body, biting at your extremities.  You deliberately wriggled your toes so that you could mark the precise order each went numb.  You haven’t been able to feel your nose for at least an hour, and, while your mother wasn’t watching, you snatched the thick toboggan from your head and ran a gloved hand through your hair to let the cold penetrate to your follicles.  “What are you doing?” came your mother’s irritated voice from the kitchen door.  You’d suffer longer for keeping dinner waiting than you would have from hypothermia, so you followed her back inside, stopping only to send one farewell puff of breath into the night air.

Eventually, as the years pass, the cold becomes more tiresome than exciting, and you look forward to the days when the hatchet, its handle worn smooth by decades of use, can stay dry for a change instead of chopping through the layers of stubbornly regenerating ice preventing your livestock from accessing the water in their troughs.  Once you’ve talked over the idea sufficiently with your neighbors and with the men at the feed store, you decide to invest in water trough heaters to spare the hatchet—and your forearms—a few hours of effort.  You install them without incident and enjoy the sight of rippling water as a replacement to white sheets of ice, and you use the extra time for other tasks—until you realize the old bay mare is flat refusing to drink from her trough.  You lead her to it, pulling off your glove to trail your fingers in the water and show her it’s safe, but she snorts and tugs away from you, her lower lip trembling (the saggy lip is her one physical flaw, and she uses it to her advantage) as she implores you to bring back the old way of doing things.  She’s pushing thirty years old, so you spend the time you gained from no longer having to chop ice by taking her a personal bucket of water—a bucket she demands you fill twice.  You are relieved when she finally concedes that her pasture-mates are still alive despite having drunk from the foreign contraption, and she nonchalantly noses past the floating heater as though she’d never objected to its presence.

It’s the smile you find has involuntary crossed your lips when thinking about the fussy old mare and the pains you’ll take to please her.  It’s the weariness in your bones, but the assurance you’ll carry on the next day as you have for the days before.  It’s the harsh uncertainties and subtle beauties of the world around you, and the knowledge that your role is relatively insignificant in the scheme of things.  It’s the squish of the mud beneath your boots when you crunch through a thin layer of ice; it’s the evidence of the new season gradually stepping in to take the place of the old.