Thoreau Farm

It’s a cloudy February day in the aftermath of another storm. A uniform gray bathes the campus where I work; pallor sets up in every face; the snow squeaks underfoot. “When is spring?” I hear a student wonder. Spring seems as distant as the summer past. Then the sun comes.

I’m walking, hunched against the cold, between classes when its light arrests me. I look up at the sun’s disc over our administration building, aware for a moment that this could be the beginning of some saccharine school story, and at the precise angle of our meeting, I feel warmth. I turn to face the sun more squarely, and, in the folds of my dark scarf, a tiny riot of heat spreads to my neck. I smile and walk back toward the building I’ve just left.

To the left of the doors, there’s a stone ledge stretching beneath the hallway windows, and where the Ceramics Studio juts left, there’s an oblique-angled corner. I go there, strip off and make pillow of my coat and sit down on its softness. Cupped by the corner, I lean back and resume relations with the sun; I close my eyes and feel the sun’s palm spread warmth across my face, along my scarf to my chest. Palmy dreams begin.

Not me, clearly, but surely a kindred sun-spirit

The school bell jars me; I look up to a few quizzical faces on the path ten yards away. Have I been talking in my sleep, ordering, perhaps, a tropical drink, humming softly a Jimmy Buffet tune? The students walk on, away from this momentary curiosity. I am sun addled, but to them I’m perhaps a small pocket of weirdness on the way to lunch. Reverie returns, bringing Henry Thoreau with it.

Thoreau, when confronted by the vital daily question of where he should walk, often paused at his door and waited for the needle of his heart’s compass to settle; more often than not, that needle pointed southwest. I take heart that this writer I’ve followed for years was drawn in the sun’s direction. But the secret to a winter sun-spot lies equally in the direction not faced, the northeast. Our most punishing winds originate there, and this corner puts a whole building between me and winter’s wind channel.

My spot is all sun, and, aside from our bell’s metal reminder of who I am and my schedule, here I can drift on the little raft of my mind. Here I can shift seasons, book passage, swim out of season.

I’m guessing that many of you have your February sun spots too.

“But the winter was not given to us for no purpose. We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. It is a cold, hard season, its fruit, no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty…The winter was made to concentrate and harden and mature the kernel of his [man’s] brain, to give tone and firmness and consistency to his thought. Then is the great harvest of the year, the harvest of thought…Now we burn with a purer flame like the stars; our oil is winter-strained.”  Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1/30/54

Late last evening, as the core of our big snow arrived, I sat by the window and watched the stream of white flow horizontally through an illuminated cone cast by a klieg light. It was mesmerizing. When the wind blew hard and steady from the northeast, the flakes became a river, boiling by, seeming even to curl over and around unseen stones in the air; but then, when the wind paused, spun sometimes on its heels, the snow whirled too, scattering like embers shot from a popping fire, or those running from some place of riot.

Minutes into this reverie, I saw a dark body shoot through the lit patch…and then another. Two birds, though what sort I couldn’t tell. And wasn’t it rather late, I wondered; shouldn’t they be puffed up and perched in some dense conifer, sheltering from this storm?

In the morning’s still-dense snow, I saw tentative answer. A flock of over-wintering robins was in a rank of wild cherry trees, whose concentrated berries clung still to the branches. The robins ate facing into the gale, sometimes floating back off their branches during gusts, seemingly at home in the wild air. And then, one, two, three streaked by that same window to a thick tangle of trees knit together by the invasive bittersweet. Perhaps bittersweet is an approved second course after cherries.

Robin and Wild Cherries

But the cherries, which often draw cedar waxwings in the fall, have been there untouched all through this open winter. Were they being banked for such a season-closing storm? Perhaps.

Later, I would go out for the ritual uncovering of path and cars, for the close sound of the snow-stirring wind and the tick and rattle of ice crystals on my parka. But for some minutes, I watched the birds moving between these two berries and thought back to the night’s pouring river of snow. I hadn’t harvested any great thoughts, but the way the roaring river of wind had carried the snow seemed akin to “a purer flame like the stars.” My mind seemed to draw upon an oil that felt “winter-strained,” and both these robins and I seemed intent on finding the nutty fruit of a “cold, hard season.”

And you, what appeared to you through the curtains of our big snow?

“I knew a crazy man who walked into an empty pulpit one Sunday and, taking up the hymn book, remarked: ‘We have had a good fall for getting in corn and potatoes. Let us sing Winter.’ So I say, ‘Let us sing Winter.’ What else can we sing and our voice be in harmony with the season?” Henry Thoreau, Journal, 1/30/54

Sometimes, I feel like that crazy man.

The buzz (a sort of song) begins days in advance. For me, the mix of modern forecasting tools and work at a school ensures rumor’s percolation well before any storm coalesces off the mid-Atlantic, where our biggest, our “historic” snows all come from. Prediction of snow makes us all ten again.

None more so than my friend, Don. Yes, Don has professional reason for his weather-eye (he is in charge of our school’s plant and emergency preparations), but his weather-heart is that of a kid. Last fall, when my eponymous hurricane was making its approach to catastrophe along the mid-Atlantic, I received a series of e-mails tracking and speculating…about me. To defend myself, I had to resort to verse:

963 (my central pressure)

…I got it all goin’, me wind is up,
I got de spin, me cheeks is bowin’.
What you gonna do when de wind start blowin’…

o, donnie donnie k, gon blow you plans all away.

…forecasters now got me goin’ to new jersey,
but I ain’t goin’ dere, dem guys is crazy;
I comin’ to see you in you Concord place,
we gonna play wit de roofs and play wit you face.

S-caine

This week my inbox began the beep and chatter again. “This could be epic,” began one e-note, anticipating a Boston.com headline by days. Power-point summaries and a thick accumulation of links followed – not that I needed much prodding to begin my own cyber-sleuthing of the oncoming storm’s formation. Long before the word “blizzard” was broken out by weather’s officialdom, I’d begun to envision horizontal snow and car-shrouding drifts.

“Let us sing Winter,” I wrote back, hoping to annoy Don by quoting Thoreau, and I began my wait for winter to sing back. But, like any true ten-year-old, I was antsy with anticipation, and so, tiring of hectoring Don with minute-by-minute e-mails, I took myself out for a walk along the river. It was cold, but only the faintest flow of air reinforced that cold when I turned north. Skim ice had edged back out toward the river’s current after the recent thaw, and the water was winter-black, its swirls had the thickness of oil. Only the riverside ice and frozen pools in shallow depressions retained a scrim of snow; they shone white in the leaf-brown landscape. Saplings had on their clerical collars of ice, and in one waterside thicket, a flash of red said, “cardinal.” As close to religious sanction as I get, I walked on, the only sound the scuffing of winter-tired leaves underfoot.

As often happens during such walks, my inner-child gave way to a more contemplative self, and I was mulling over this easy, open winter and its variations, even as tomorrow it would put on its usual white coat. Near walk’s end, along the old railroad grade that approaches the vanished bridge over the Sudbury, a flood of sunlight slipped through a slat in the clouds, and, almost immediately, the little sunbank was alive with birds. “Juncos,” I thought. But then a chip of color flew by and lit on a nearby branch; I looked more closely: skyblue back, ruffous breast. Bluebirds. Heart of summer sky. Beyond their winter range, but assuredly here.

These blue reminders piled up against the predicted storm, a mash-up of seasons. I sat down in those few minutes of sun and listened to the bluebirds overturning leaves, scuffling I guessed for cold-slow insects and wondered about the way our days contain so many weathers. And I walked back wondering also where these bluebirds would be tomorrow, when, if Don and his prophet NOAA are right, the snow will be above my knees.

Perhaps I am a crazy man. Surely I have trouble sorting the silly from the serious, just as our seasons seem uncertain of themselves too.

Still, “Let us sing Winter.”