Snow Day

I always forget how beautiful virgin snowfall in deep woods can be. Six inches of powder on the ground, two inches on every branch. Talk about isolated. I'm feeling fairly remote. TR calls to verify that I'm alive, that I can't get out, and that, certainly, no one can get in. He wants to call back later and talk about the Passion. Even the crows have holed up somewhere. Just a slight breeze, enough to blow snow off high branches. I can't walk outside because snow keeps falling inside my collar. It's so lovely, the way everything is defined. I find a Slippery Elm that is bent in a perfect arc and mark it with crime-scene tape. It's a great stick to become a railing for a flared set of stairs. Slippery Elm is lovely wood. It takes a very hard glossy finish. The crows are gone, I suspect they've moved down to the Hemlock stand in the wilderness area, it's better protected; but my three old battered comrades are back and I microwave them a couple of mice. I just read, make notes, drink tea. I made some jasmine rice and ate the last of the pork strips, later I made an omelet with some onions I had cooked beyond caramelization, into the nether world of onion crisps. It was very good. Later, reclining in my tree-tip pit, strumming a slack guitar, with a blue tarp funneling away the moisture right at the edge of freezing. Icicles are a universal problem. Sometimes I can't go outside. It's constellated against any personal intervention. Reverse threads, why didn't I think of that. Eat toast and be happy. After 36 hours of extreme quiet, a dripping on the roof awakes me, then a loud thud as a mass of snow falls on the back porch. It's a physical event, the house shakes, and even though it happens two or three times a years, it always catches me off guard. Loki, or an ice-bear hammering at the door. The Dire Wolf, or some such. At first I used to set in the dark with a shotgun, now I just open the door and scoop compressed snow into a five gallon bucket to melt for wash water. A gift horse. By late afternoon snow is falling off the trees like a blizzard. It's like watching a quiet war. Drone strikes with no audio. Mangled bodies but no screams. I have a nice fire going and decide to bake both halves of an acorn squash stuffed with a red onion, raspberry jam. It's something I can actually do. In the future, I'd like to have a miniature log-splitter I could use for winter squash but in the nonce I use a cleaver. Splitting a squash is similar to splitting an oak round. There's always a certain amount of uncertainty.