Among their rich russet trunks I feel a remembrance of the primeval. To think that all forests used to stand so tall. Maggie and I made a conscious decision to make this walk a daily part of our lives. We could, like most others here in the North who live with winter, have paid the money to have our driveway plowed so that we too could go from warmth to warmth, or we could have invested the money to buy an old plow and then we would have struggled against the snow like so many of our neighbors just so we could have a clear shot from the road to the door. As it is we carve out a small, twenty by twenty parking space off the side of the road beyond the reach of the thrown snow and we pack a trail through the woods.
Snow is an adversary to so many.
When I watch the extremes my friends and neighbors go to in order to clear the snow, I wonder what it is all for. For once snow falls I must, by design, live in it, sledding my groceries to the house, dashing down the path in the mornings to get to work, ambling along at midnight with only starshine reflected on the snow. These moments make me aware that so much of my life is a serendipitous admixture of intention and spontaneity. Where the two come together I find the mystery and reward which give this life its purpose. And even though I tire of the walk by March and wish to be able just to get in my car as zoom to work, I would not give up the walk through the woods, the shadows on the snow, the occasional tete a tete with the owl which winters over.