The Whipped Cream Snow, going, going
By: Nancy Adams
Tags: Rain, Hiking, Snow, Dogs, Cats

I sit at the table with my hot cup of coffee. The new fire in the fireplace has caught. No, it smolders. I bellow some air . It flames. Maybe it is all right. Judge has raced out and raced back in. Annie, too. She poked her head out the door and went out for the first time since the cold spell. She came in complaining. It is raining.

Today it rains. It rains away the light catching icicles. It rains the snow, the great heaps of snow, the snow that covered everystill thing in a soft plop of snow. It settled into every limb and branch, into every window and door. It silenced the street and the walkers. It made the familiar new.

Judge and I walked, crossing the deer Times Square by the vineyard. Crisscrossing tracks, sometimes narrow passages, sometimes groupings of four hoof marks, a great space and then four more hoof marks. I see the deer in my mind’s eye making great jumps in the thick snow. The deer, not me. My boots sink deep. Each step is a slog. The snow holds my boot, and my leg. I pull it up and lean forward. The boot goes deep again. The snow pulls against my other leg.

Judge has begun the walk with a snow celebration. A tree branch is weighed down by snow. Judge grabs it ferociously and bites off the last bit, and then the next bit. He bounds and arcs away and then back. The snow tickles his belly. His jumps stop. His legs never clear the snow. He discovers my path and follows it for a minute.

I remember his way with snowshoes. He follows close behind the snowshoer and begins to put his paws on the shoes, a free ride till the person wearing the snowshoes catches on and protests. Maybe he thinks I should be wearing snowshoes. I think I should be wearing snowshoes.

Judge has smell destinations on the path we are taking. Some are old history, an old smell story of woodland death perhaps. One smell is current events, big empty dog kibble bags blown far away from their house and caught in the blackberry canes at the beginning of the woods. Merv has taken the bags away, but Judge visits the canes where they had blown and caught. He digs deep into the snow and sucks in the old kibble smell, like a smoker with the first cigarette of the day.

We keep going, up the sledding hill now. The base has ice under the snow, that gives each step a little one two punch, down, crack, further down. A little ice surprise. The hill is hard work, hard snow work of stories, stories I remember now by the fire, “a mile up hill in two feet of snow to school,” Dad says. The walk was its own think. Concentration of the next step deep into the snow, and then the next step. A quiet snow world. Judge and me. Breath and sun.

We come to the little bridge over the stream, the old stream that piped its way to the train depot and the water tank for the steam engines, when there were steam engines, and a train, and tracks, and the depot. The snow has extended the bridge, has obscured the edge of the bridge. Judge explores the chasm but pulls back before a fall. I cross the bridge, carefully, right down the middle.

We are behind the barn. Two bits of leek flower stick up through the snow, the leeks that Dad planted, that grow year after year, uncut, uneaten. Old boards, barn debris are soft long bumps and hillocks. Judge moves, relieved? Onto the plowed driveway and up the stairs to the house.

A memory now of sun, clean air, sparkles in the snow, gleam of icicles. Today is rain, stripes of rain down the sunroom windows, watered silk designs, refracting the branches behind. The rain drops beat an uneven rhythm. Annie watches out the window. For a squirrel? A mouse? For the rain to wash away the snow?

I watch the fire. The heat begins to reach me. I eye the coffee cup. Empty. Time to do something about that. Good morning!