It is cold. Not cold where you debate wearing a hat cold, but the kind of cold where the snow squeaks when you walk on it, like sneakers in a gym. January cold.
When I go out to do chores I spend a good ten minutes mummifying myself. Wool, head to toe or, if you begin with my daily-worn hand knit wool socks, toe to head. I climb onto the presenting edge of our wood box and teeter there while sifting through the hat collection. I haul out my farm-designated, dusty wool hat, red neck warmer and chunky green mittens. Farm, not fashion.
My daily ATV-run with Muir is painful. I pull the neck warmer up over my mouth so that the air I breath into my lungs is slightly warmed. My hands begin hurting almost immediately from gripping the cold handles. As I drive down our road my eyes water and I tug the hat down as low as it will go while still allowing me to see. Muir spins circles at the top of the road and turns to head back home, I follow in hot pursuit, blinking uncontrollably and still not remotely able to keep up.
This said, I am not complaining. I love winter and this kind of cold. Any precipitation immediately crystallizes into snowflakes. I stand, feed bucket in hand, and watch them slowly spin around me.
Each evening, beginning just before the holidays, we unfold our small black card table in the living room and light a fireplace fire to eat dinner in front of. Sam circles the table like a Great White shark, hoping that we will drop crumbs: sometimes stealing our paper napkin and, if we don’t catch him quickly enough, eating it. The fire is beautiful but it is the sound that I love. That sound lives in our core, it is the base of what makes us human, we understand it’s language. Great chunks of wood clunk as they shift, changing intensity of the flame. Moisture causes wood to periodically pop and crack. When we turn off lights in preparation for bed, I always stick my head back in and watch the reflection of the dying fire cast shadows across wood walls, knowing that my ancestors did the same thing in caves.
There is peace in the cold, quiet at the heart of winter. Our torpor-state allows us to digest the events of the summer, perhaps even stuff them to the back of our minds, stored like summer clothes. Now that the ground is frozen, white covers broken branches, stream-rutted banks, mud left from the disastrous July: and my fear becomes folded and stored as well. When moisture presents as crystals, I’m able to forget the sound of unrelenting downpour.
Twilight closes with me checking on animals. The chickens have long since high-stepped back into their coops and settled in familiar patterns, nestled wing to wing on their roosts. I make sure their hinged doors are down and latched. They have no interest in any evening visitors who arrive without green mittens filled with blueberries. The sheep hear the squeak of my boots and begin to call. Muir races ahead of me to the fence and barks at them. They are sure of their fence and stare back at him until he, slightly embarrassed, turns away. I open the barn door, lifting my scoop of cracked corn above my head, sometimes needing to give Quince a bit of a shove with my knee to keep him from rearing like a curly Unicorn. I quickly drop small piles of energy around for them. They race each other, the fastest they ever move, to claim a pile. I watch them nibble while I grab a pitchfork and fluff their bedding. I stand at the door and make sure there is no limping, that everyone is part of the game- no isolating. Some nights I forget that I lost three ewes this summer and look for Mrs. Chubbers as part of the head count. I miss Charlotte lifting her gaze to me, a little haughty at first, but then warming up and coming over for a good bum scratch. Winter wool makes us all like a good bum scratch.
Daisy, Mrs. Chubber’s daughter, has accepted her mother’s loss. Finally. For a while she, like me, would call for her mum and scan the fence line, as if she might appear out of the cold night air. Sometimes Mrs. C comes to me in my dreams and I see her steady gaze watching me sleep. This helps me to let go of her gaze as she fell, beside me, into the straw of her home, dead.
Paul and I finished youth orchestra Saturday morning. We put on warm clothes, and packed water bottles and two dogs into the truck to hike along the lake. As we drove along the interstate we heard the unmistakable scream of the air in Muir’s lungs being squeezed out by an epileptic seizure. Paul turned, quickly, and saw Muir fall off the seat onto the floor, seizing. I pulled to the side of the road, turned on my flashers and ran to the back. We leaned in and stroked his back until things quieted.
Muir is just two. His ears live at perfect forty five degree angle to his head. He runs like a puppy and is completely devoted to me. He began having seizures at about the same time as the flood last summer.
We called our vet and then Paul and I looked at each other. We didn’t know if we should turn around and go home or continue our journey. Muir was stable, although loopy. I sat still, wanting the right answer to come to me, wanting the seizures to stop, wanting my puppy to be normal, wanting a guarantee that the floods would never happen again, that our land would continue to support sheep grazing, that Mrs. Chubbers and her steady gaze were still living in my barn. Wanting to understand.
I looked up from the steering wheel, turned to Paul and said, “Let’s go.”