Category: Weather

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Still Snowing

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I love snow, and woke to a world full of it this morning, snow piled to the railings on the back deck, a huge white hood covering the grill.  Sitting by the wood stove with my cup of coffee, the kindling I’d set on the coals flicked into flame, a burst of light through the glass door. The blush of color ringing the dawn horizon deepened and caught fire also.

All the snow in the past few weeks, the storms and the skiing, and my obsessive checking of weather forecasts, reminds me of so many winters, so many treks through deep snow, so many outdoor adventures reveling in the way a great storm transforms the fields and forests into a cross-country skiing paradise.

In the year after Eric died, I couldn’t bring myself to ski or enjoy winter.  Snow storms made me sad.  Skiing had been such a part of our lives together, it didn’t feel right to ski without Eric.  I spent that first winter watching storms, rather than celebrating them.

Recognizing how far I’ve moved from that place of paralyzed grief, I remembered this poem from The Truth About Death, which I wrote just about exactly 8 years ago.  Eric would be happy knowing I’m back to celebrating explosions of snow like the storm that rode through New Hampshire yesterday.  He would have loved this winter.  Let it snow.

Valentine’s Day

The first real storm washes out the little color
in the landscape, the barn and shed and silo
weathered to the gray of a cut snow bank.
Sparrows peck in the perennial bed, tall stems
and seed heads clustered through snow. Small storms
of snow blow up off the roof of the hay shed,
sweep past. We would ski at midnight to catch
the pure snow before the storm slipped over to sleet.
So much happens every day, I need a wagon to hold
the hole. Last night I lay on the kitchen floor,
where our cat slept for her last year, her old body
bony, weightless. I noticed the narrow maple
floor boards running under the hutch, thinking
the world is flat even as I know it is round.

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Day 10: Slow Down

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The sun kept burning a blur through the clouds for a couple of hours after the snow started.  At one point the day even brightened, the sun sharpened in the gray sky, and the snow picked up.  A paradox.  By the time David and I headed out across the fields for a quick ski before dark there was only snow and a flat, monotone sky.

Climbing a steep hill I heard a loud flutter and crash and looked up from working my skis in a herring bone pattern to counter the slope.  Turkeys, several of them lifting from high in the white pines, dark shapes moving between the tall trunks and settling back into the jumble of branches, disappearing again.  

I’d started my day frustrated and teary, getting lost on my way to a writers’ group meeting.  There was no reason to be lost.  I’ve been to this friend’s house many times, I’d looked at the directions again on-line before I left.  I even took the right turn, then told myself it didn’t look right and turned around.  For at least a few miles I knew I was going the wrong way but I didn’t stop to put the friend’s address into my phone and get directions.  I just kept driving.

It didn’t make sense, to keep going in the wrong direction because I was late and impatient and felt like I didn’t have time to stop and make sure I knew where I was.  And where I was going.  It all just made me even later.

Why do I have so much trouble slowing down?

Wild turkeys don’t think about where they’re going.  They heard David and me climbing the hill under where they were roosting, one of them flapped off its branch, which stirred the rest of them, and there was a commotion for a few moments.  Then quiet.

Where am I trying to go?

Wherever that might be, the late day ski helped me let go of my mistake and frustration.  One ski forward, then the next, my arms planting my poles into the snow in a regular pattern.  Left, right, up, down.  Movement.  I wasn’t trying to get anywhere other than into the woods, in the snow, in the falling light.  

Skiing back to the house the falling snow in dusk light made it look like we were moving underwater.

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Too Hot to Blog

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I’ve been busy, not that being busy is in any way unusual for me, but there have been deadlines to some of what I’d had to do this past week (consulting work), and getting things done that require paying attention, sitting at a desk, in a hot house, has not been easy.  Normally, I spend an hour or three at a time at my desk, whether writing a grant as a consultant, or doing a webinar, or doing my own work, editing poetry or writing an essay or pulling something together for one of the boards I’m on.  When I get restless, which happens a lot, I go outside and weed my garden for a while, go for a bike ride, a swim, a walk, or pick some of the abundance of wild blueberries this year, something outside and direct and physical.

Not this week.  When I needed a break from my work, I just walked around looking for a cooler space in the house.   Being outside during the day was impossibly uncomfortable and hot.  I did go swimming, but not much else.  I got my work done, went for a swim, then sat on the back deck at the end of the day with David, both of us basically panting, trying to stay cool enough to get through dinner and get into bed with multiple fans blowing on us.  My brain was on semi-permanent melt — work, eat, collapse.  What was there to say that would be interesting for a blog?

But I was paying attention to the forecast (another thing that is not in any way unusual for me) and kept seeing the temperatures predicted for Friday as being the highest of the week.  Early in my week of work, I decided to get what I needed done completed by Thursday afternoon so David and I could have a summer vacation day on Friday.

We did.  We got up yesterday morning and put the kayak racks on the car for the first time this summer, then loaded up the kayaks and a cooler of snacks, and headed for Squam Lake.  Squam Lake is a special place for me.  It was our family vacation spot for all the years from when Sam was a year old until two years after Eric died — 21 years. Kayaking on Squam was Eric’s favorite thing to do, the lake his favorite place in the world.  The day Eric died, as we were trying to figure out how to prepare his body for pick up by the funeral home, Adrienne, Sam, John and I agreed that nothing would be so fitting as dressing Eric in his kayak shorts and water shoes.  We considered putting a paddle beside him, to be tucked into the coffin and buried with him, but knew Eric would object to that as a waste of good equipment.

As David and I turned onto Metcalf Road yesterday, headed for the kayak launch spot on Squaw Cove, a wave of memory passed through me, bringing back all the years of getting ready for a week on the lake, all the years of Eric and I kayaking to favorite spots to swim and pick berries and relax, all the years of dipping our paddles into the clear lake water as we watched the march of the Sandwich Range mountains fading into the haze of summer days on the north shore.

Yesterday on the lake was perfect.  It was viciously hot in most of the country, but fine sitting on the fine white sand beaches of Squam Lake, half-submerged in water.  David and I paddled and swam and read and had a picnic and I wrote in my Island Journal, a memoir I’m writing that I can only write while on islands (more on that in a later post). We went to three islands yesterday.  At one point I asked David how he was doing (not an easy week for either or us, for reasons as easy to ascribe to the heat as anything else) and he said, “I’m great.  This is the essential ‘us.’  Getting out into the world and moving and being and enjoying”

We didn’t leave the lake until dinner time, driven back to our car by hunger.  We picked up sandwiches in Holderness and ate sitting on a dock, watching the light fade over the water.  Yes, maybe it was a week too hot for blogging, a week to hot for anything but getting done what had to be done.  But it was an evening cool enough for imagination, after a week soaked in the sweat of real life and obligation.  Time to let go.  Time to float into a weekend as the cooler air moved in.

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Above Tree Line: March

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We walked into another world today — the alpine zone on the Franconia Ridge.  Waking to a cloudy day that didn’t have a promising forecast, we kept moving with our plan to meet Ellen and hike today, knowing this was our last free day to get above tree line in March.  As we drove up 93 towards the mountains, we could see the white peaks of Mt. Lafayette and Mt. Liberty gleaming in spots of sunshine, clouds breaking open to blue sky above us.

The sun was shining through the freshly snow showered trees as we started out on the Falling Waters Trail.  But by the time we got to the falling water that gives the trail its name, the clouds had moved back in and soon after that it started snowing.  It snowed the rest of the hike.

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The trail was well packed under the few inches of new powder, so we had no trouble following the worn depression in the snow.  The only trouble was when we accidentally stepped even inches off the track — posthole, a leg lost up to the crotch in snow.

The Falling Waters Trail is a steep climb up the west side of the ridge, but it was stunningly beautiful.  Snow and ice on the river, snow on branches, snow on spruce, snow on our hats and our backs.  Snow so deep ten foot trees looked four feet tall, and a sign that in summer is at head height was at my knees.

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We kept trudging up and up and finally broke out into the alpine zone, above the trees, 3,000 feet above where we started.  The view was mostly snow and cloud, with one ridge rising out of the fogginess to our south.  Then we turned around and slid, slipped and glided down, another month’s above tree line intention done.

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Dark Day

Yesterday evening, when I got home after a full day of meetings, errands and lunch with a friend in Concord, I saw a star of morning glory blossoms at the top of the teepee we made for the vines to climb.  I thought of getting up this morning and taking a photograph of the flowers, and basing a blog post on rejoicing in whatever is still putting out blossoms this far into the diminishing light of fall.  But I woke up to dark skies, rain, fog tucked in behind the trees on the horizon, and little reason to go any further out the door than the porch.

Last night I picked up Cutting for Stone and started a new chapter.  It’s a big book with a big story, and this chapter picked up a new point of view, with more back story from this character.  I put the book down and closed my eyes and thought for a few minutes.  Do I really want to keep working on the novel I started?  The attention I’ve given to novel structures as I’ve read over the past several months is giving me more confidence I could.  The stacks and stacks of short story drafts I repacked when David and I unloaded the storage pod in the driveway, transferring boxes to the barn shelves, were a reminder, from 30 years ago, that I once wrote fiction prolifically.

Or do I want to work on The Island Journal?  Whenever I open the file on my computer and look at it I get encouraged by its story and language.  And I already know I have lots of work to do to get ready for The Truth About Death to be published in April.  But maybe I just want to order hiking socks online today, then start organizing the room David was using as his studio to be our bedroom again.

Right now, the rain just picked up, there are shots echoing from some nearby pond where a hunter is hoping to get a duck, and I won’t be going out to take any morning glory photos any time soon.

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More Poetry Play

First, today has been a total 10 on a 1 – 10 scale of perfection.  The sun is clear, hot and sparkling on the water of the bay, the air is cool with a light breeze, and I’m in a waterfront house with only a tiny bit of work to do.  And there was an earthquake today! Sitting on the deck eating lunch, I felt everything start to move back and forth.  For a minute, I thought there was something wrong with me, some inner balance suddenly gone so that the world was now a shifting quiver.  I looked up at David in the kitchen and said, “Is there an earthquake going on?”  “I think so,” he answered, and then the quaking stopped.  Thankfully, it appears to have done little damage, even near the epicenter.

So, here is the poem David wrote almost two weeks ago, during our morning of poetry play.  The word prompts were the same that gave me the poem I posted two days ago: ruffle, marshy, sun visor, visible, tenuous, waiting, cobble, gibbous, orb, oblong. Tomorrow will be another poem from David, using words we had our family generate following day.  Lots of poetry in my life right now, which is a very good thing.

Sargent and the Four Daughters

There must have been a gibbous moon unmasked
the feathering of the Earth
softening the chill edge into that curtain
drawn deep across the shadows of the painting.
One is barely visible in the darker folds,
her sister more forward in the brushed light
before the bright one in ruffles
who draws the eye naturally.
I cannot see the fourth I know is there
somewhere else
searching for words in the road.

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Low Light, Green Light, Pink Light

There’s been a tornado watch in southern NH this evening, and when we left work the skies were dark, we could hear distant thunder, and it was raining in Concord.  A colleague had emailed me to say there was hail the size of softballs in Keene.  I got out into the garden as soon as I got home, wanting to beat any coming storm to the perennial bed I’d yet to weed this season.  And just to be sure it would rain, I watered all the new plants I’ve put in over the past few days.

But it didn’t rain, radar loops online show the storms blowing south of us, and now the light is low, feeding up from the sun below the horizon.  Just moments ago the clouds were holding the light against all the late spring vegetation and the world outside the windows was green — not scary tornado green, but a soft, growing glow.  The trees are tossing in the wind and now the clouds are catching the last bits of sun and burning pink and gold.  The air is cool and smells like rain, but there is clear sky between the clouds and the dusk is deepening, turning the tall pines black.