Blanketed

Woke up to six inches of snow, still coming down, no power or phone. I retreated to my sleeping bag and went back to sleep. Finally heard the refrigerator come back on, got out of bed, started a fire, turned on the electric heater, and curled up on the sofa with the new John Sandford novel. The woods are beautiful, every branch holding a couple of inches of snow, and with every small gust of wind a wave of tree-snow is blown adrift. I'm nominally trapped, for a day or two at least, as Upper Twin is the last road in the county to get plowed, and then there's the problem of getting up the hill unto Mackletree, which is impossible before it gets plowed and salted. Fortunately, I have tobacco, whiskey, and food. I'll need to clear a path out to the woodshed tomorrow. I have the Sandford novel, the huge Sargent book, and the holiday double-issue of the New Yorker. It's so quiet outside, I'll be able to hear the snowplow when it passes. Every hour or so I do the entire circuit inside the house, looking out every window. This is more snow than there was all of last year. I get out my insulated Red Wing boots and my gaiters (neither of which I used last year) and waterproof the boots. Dig out the insulated Carhartt overalls from the laundry basket where I keep specialty clothing, bring them downstairs and drape them over a chair near the stove. Cold insulated overalls are a pain in the ass. A day like this I'll read for ten hours. I finish preparation for the foray, outside, tomorrow; and eat a wonderful Muir Glen Organic Chicken Tortilla soup with buttered saltines. It's an expensive soup, but I found a couple of cans in the discontinued cart at Kroger for eighty cents each. Wish I'd rummaged for more, it's very good. I save what I'm writing (turned on the computer as soon as the power came back on) every few minutes, because it is a given fact that the electricity will go out again. I'm amazed I have phone service. I get the house almost warm enough, burning a rock maple kinder-garden desk, but tomorrow I'll bring in some Osage Orange wood, which shares with Live Oak the distinction of barely floating. Specific gravity of .95, 59 lbs to a cubic foot. Oddly, I find a fair amount of it in the flood plain, I think because it's so heavy it grounds out first when the waters recede. It's a beautiful wood, but brutal on tools because it's so hard. I have a piece I'm saving to take down to my friend Kim, in Tallahassee, who carves the most elegant spoons in the Western Hemisphere. Glenn and I burned several large branches, for a couple of weeks, cut laboriously by hand, from a large tree outside the de-sanctified Congregational church where we lived together for a year or so. It's very hard wood. When I was building my pirogue with Les (he was the brains of the operation), we carved Osage Orange knees for the ribs and it was like filing steel. It's so goddamn dense, that I suspect a silicate, like with Ebony, in there somewhere. Just before dark one of the young squirrels came out of their nest, I caught the movement of bushy tail out of the corner of my eye, scampered down the hickory tree and burrowed into the snow at the base of the tree, came out, shaking himself, with an acorn in either cheek. The winter larder of nuts. I'd best go hibernate. A down sleeping bag, military issue, mummy type, is a great comfort on a night like this, despite the difficulty in rolling over.