Blanketed

The white world. Power out before I finished writing last night, thus the unsigned post. The patter of sleet changing to an enormous silence. Heavy wet snow. So cocooned I missed my early morning stoking, consequently the house was quite cold when I finally got up. Outside to pee and the world is a white marvel, still snowing, and 6 inches of snow on what had been slightly damp branches leaves several inches even on branches the size of your little finger. The woods become opaque in fifty feet, white on white. The stove is still a bit warm, the house is 50 degrees inside, I go back to bed, to try and retrieve a dream, and let the stove cool completely, as I might as well clean the smoke-chase and stove-pipe. Supposed to clear and get very cold tonight, can't be too careful. Power comes back on, I leave the radio on NPR so I'll know exactly when, and I get back up to turn on one of the small back-up electric heaters over near the cookstove. When I get up for good, it's Carhartt bibs over sweat pants, sweatshirt over merino sweater over tee-shirt, thick wool socks over silk socks (Goodwill) and an ridiculous pair of house-slippers and the new bath robe over all. Make a serious double espresso, drink a protein shake, and clean the various runs and chases, knock down the pitch in the pipe, vacuum up the mess, lay a fire. But I don't light it, because I'm warm, dressed thus, change into boots and go outside to sweep a path to the woodshed, which warms me even more, so I come back inside, make another coffee, crawl under a blanket on the sofa and read Horace for a while. I have a nice selected poems that is bilingual and I can play with translation then laugh at my mistakes. I was looking for a particular quote, Ira furor brevis est, "Anger is a brief madness" which they translate as 'passing madness', but close enough. I don't find the quote, which might not have been Horace after all. Then I spend a while reading about Bingham Fluids, which are those, like mayonnaise and, famously, ketchup, that stay maddeningly solid until you tap too hard and catch a flood to the lap. Slow liquids. The east side of all the tree trunks are covered in snow, which means this storm came from the wrong direction. Most of our winter storms come from Fargo via Canada. I think this means that the jet-stream has migrated slightly north of Portsmouth. Stops snowing mid-afternoon and the temps are dropping fast, so I finally light the fire, and by late afternoon melt snow and heat enough water to wash my hair and shave. Make a batch of grits, fry bacon, and have breakfast a couple of times. It's beautiful outside, never got the expected winds, and everything stays frozen in place. The last diffused light is almost pink, almost blue radiates from the snow. Very quiet, blanketed; I roll a smoke, take a sitting pad and a drink out on the back stoop and sit for nearly an hour. It's so peaceful, so serene, lovely beyond expression, sublime; I only come in when my toes are just short of frozen. Wash my feet with warm water in a huge stainless steel bowl I found somewhere, change socks, wash some long underwear in the rinse water, then rinse again in water from the stove, drape it to dry over a dining room chair. I have clothes everywhere, components of various outfits, draped here and there, neatly folded on flat surfaces, hanging on loops near the back door. By the end of winter all of my clothes are in play, I choose what is dry and can be layered. The real hazard isn't freezing to death, but slipping and falling. I pay particular attention to where every foot falls: when you're young you'd just break a collar bone, the joint designed to fail, but when you're older you might break a hip. Takes me a while to see what I'm saying, that the natural world is dangerous as well as beautiful, the women I've known. Dropping a tree is always like that clip of Babe Ruth, pointing with his bat, I think I'll drop it there. Sometimes you do, some times things are constellated, sometimes not. There's a lot of snow, everything is covered, my cheap-ass excuse is bullshit, what I couldn't see. Almost everything.