Zero Visibility

White on white. Could tell from the nature of the stillness, when I woke before dawn, that it was snowing. When it gets light I still can't see. I'd let the fire go out (it was only 25 degrees and the house was warm) so I could dump ashes, but I had a new fire all set. The stove was still warm. Grits and eggs, a second cup of coffee. Can't see across the hollow. Decide to make a camper's beef stew, from reconstituted jerky, dried and canned vegetables. I'll make a pone of cornbread. Dry snow, the slightest breeze and it blows off branches in cascades. If a stronger wind comes along, the ground snow swirls into white-outs where you can't see ten feet. My goal for the day is to make two trips to the woodshed, beyond that, I'll read, and if the electricity holds, do some writing. I discover one last batch of dried mushrooms and add half of them to the stew, add a couple of reconstituted peppers, pull it over to the coolest part of the stove top and put it on a metal trivet to simmer for a couple of hours. Almost breaking light, which means the cloud cover isn't very thick, but it's supposed to move in again tonight, very cold and more snow. The woods become a strange place when every branch is snow covered, depth of field fails completely, and it's all so black and white. A tangle of sharp contrasts. Mid-afternoon and I still haven't gotten out to the woodshed. Sample the stew and smash some of the vegetables to thicken it, make a pone of cornbread in the eight inch skillet, my one cup of cornmeal recipe, which makes a thinner cake in a larger pan. It's snowing harder and the wind has kicked up, another complete white-out. There's a large pile of off-prints, I think B gave these to me, because of his paper problem, a large pile, maybe a thousand pages. When he's at the college, B prints out anything interesting, plate tectonics to recently translated fragments of Greek poems; high speed inter-net and free printing is one of the few perks of being an instructor. I reap benefit, second hand, and it's all news to me. The stew is quite good, in that simple, cold weather way, and I spend a pleasant evening, amused over a treatise I imagined, while reading off-prints and stoking the stove. "Gerunds Generally", which was essentially a fake academic paper and quite funny. A mental construct. I have files of useless information and I can put them together any way I want. A right you earn living close to the bone, left to your own devices. There is no nun left to rap my knuckles with a ruler. There should be, probably, but they couldn't get up the driveway. The last batch, frozen in disbelief, reported to their rector that I was beyond hope. I'm flattered. Later, a wee dram, a smoke, and I was thinking about mediation. The pope, a southern Baptist preacher, none of whom ever haul firewood, seem to operate on a different level. It's cold. Down bag and skull cap. We'll see about tomorrow.