This Month's Story

There’s ice on the pond.

It is cold. The temperature on the large round thermometer outside our bedroom window reads 20 degrees. That’s cold.

From the same window, I can see the rising sun has started to hit the woods on the far side of the field. The trees stand ablaze in the new day’s first light. The sun isn’t high enough to reach the field itself and the ground in front of the trees is still painted with a white frost. As the sun continues to rise, it will melt the frost wherever it hits, leaving the grass green in some places and white in others. It does this in a fanciful way, leaving a white outline of the timbers of the pergola amid green grass and in front of my window, there is a large white silhouette of the house.

Later, when I step out on the porch with Holly to start our downhill morning walk to get the paper, I find the thermometer on the east side of the house has already been hit by the rising sun. It reads a warm 34. This is a radiant temperature reading not air temperature; in the shade the temperature is still in the low twenties. When the sun hits me, it feels warm. Holly, I don’t know about. I never can tell whether his heavy black coat keeps his body temperature inside or the air’s cold outside. In any case he ignores it all and together, we head down to get the paper.

As Holly and I walk down the driveway’s long slope, I look over at the pond. The ice is out about four or five feet from the pond’s edges and, what ice there is, is not thick. I pick up a few pebbles and throw them at the ice. The ice breaks easily and I get a satisfying ‘Glop!!’ We continue on to get the paper as if we had accomplished something very important.

This is the start of winter no matter what the calendar reads. Days like this say that winter is here and that if we haven’t done what needs to be done to prepare for it, we will find ourselves behind an early rush of days filled with cold freezing rain and snow.

Bad days.

Days you don’t want to be outside.

Cold, wintry, snow filled days.

I worry about the snow. This years February’s snow was a too long series of bad snow days for Stella and me. The previous fall, I had made the mistake of stacking the firewood beside the white garage and when the February snows came, I found the snow was waist deep from the house to the garage. This summer, I moved the wood from the garage to beside the bedroom window. There are two cords sitting there now waiting for this winter’s fires.

I’ve done more than that. I sold quite a few books at one of the weekend fairs this fall and the Monday following went to Lowe’s and bought the biggest snow blower they had. It’s a massive, complex looking machine and it sits crouching in the white garage now, ready to bust out whenever the first serious snow of this winter tries to recreate last February’s orgy. Like I said, this is a big puppy and it looks like it can deal with anything winter can dish out.

We’ll see.

However, I really don’t look forward to any such contest. I would rather when next April comes, to look inside the white garage and see a large dust-covered snow blower, still sporting its original price tag and an unopened instruction manual. I picture it sitting lonely and, best of all, untouched,.

We have done quite a bit to get ready. All the lawn furniture is now inside the old trailer in the back, the white plastic chairs have been picked up from their places around the farm, washed and put in the garage, Stella’s garden beds have been cleaned and covered, more firewood has been stacked…

Now there we may have gone too far. A large cherry tree fell at the end of the stone wall beyond the ruin of the old barn. Carroll came by and cut it up and with the use of Les’s big splitter, made it into fireplace size pieces. Since we already had two cords stacked by the bedroom window, we had to make a new stack of three cords of firewood by the stairwell. These additional three cords and the bedroom two cords, means we won’t have to worry about firewood this winter. It may be a cold winter coming but we will be ready for it.

However I worry. I know, that next spring, we will have to do all of this in reverse.