White Again

The snow I mean, the usual fucking winter wonderland. Soft and slightly sticky, the branches are quickly covered. Small crystals, delicate and ephemeral. I look outside, once in a while, but I'm much more interested in the fact that chickens were raised mostly as fighting cocks; eating chicken, or eggs for that matter, just wasn't done. You might sacrifice one, spitted and grilled, and it would disappear, among the acolytes, with much licking of fingers. Pretty soon, grilled chicken becomes a standard of the diet. Peril and taboo. It's so quiet, when I get up to pee, I know the snow has continued. I pee in a piss-pot and flip on the back porch light, three inches of slightly compacted new wet snow with a drip line at the eaves. Right at freezing. Dangerous weather, the roads will be terrible tomorrow morning, school delays and various warnings. Then flood warnings, because there's no place for the melt to go, and, of course, the driveway is semi-molten. I'm a little hungry, so I fry a couple of polenta cakes and have them with local honey. I'm a great believer in local honey as an anodyne for local disease. Or local molasses. I read all day, an entire span of hours, drank tea, moved some commas around. Most of time I wasn't even aware of what was going on around me. Put another log on the fire, get a wee dram of Irish, roll a smoke; fall into a reverie, a lost hour in a lost day. I'm content with this. Tree snow cascading all day. Cabin fever, so I had to get outside, walked over several ridges tops, a saunter actually, because I stopped and looked closely at dozens of bushes. Swelling is evident at the branch tips, and I marvel at the natural anti-freezes that make this possible. Stopped at a puddle and raked away the snow to examine the frog eggs. Some of them survived the last cold snap. I'd love to be able to monitor temperature in these egg clusters. When I finally brought myself to taste the embryonic fluid, realized how sweet it was, and what a heat producing miniature power plant each proto-tadpole-egg actually was, it was a minor revelation. Survival is more than just not freezing, it's about storing energy in seeds and eggs, starting another growing season, toss the caber again. My depth-of-field perception is completely destroyed by which branches hold the snow and which release. Background and foreground all exist on the same plane and it's very disconcerting, I kept walking into bushes thinking they were ten feet away. Many prints in the snow, dozens of stories. A flock of turkeys had moved through and they had plowed up every leaf in their swath. There seem to be a great many grouse. I haven't heard any owls, but they must be about, the sign all points to it. Un-insulated footgear, and my feet were freezing, came inside, stoked the fire, heated water, and soaked them for a few minutes. A blissful flood of warmth. Pampered is a relative word., but massaged toes are a stair step to heaven.