About Me

My photo
Through my many years of living I have learned that gratitude, generosity, forgiveness and hopefulness are ingredients for a good life well spent.

Sunday, February 23, 2014

Starry Starry Night



This has been a hard winter. It’s not the snow. There has been a lot. More this year than I can recall since the winter we moved in twenty years ago. But the cold. It’s been this cold before of course. But not for such an extended period. Minus 33 Celsius for days on end, and before wind chill is taken into account. Minus 21 on a regular basis. Today is mild. It’s only minus 1.
But snow and cold apart, it has been the ice that has laid us asunder. Treachery under foot and under wheels. Still, when the sun shines, as it is at this moment, it couldn’t be more glorious, more breathtaking and awe-inspiring.
This past Tuesday, I had to leave early for work. Early means up at 4:45 a.m. and departure from this hilltop by 6:00 a.m. I had to force my way out the door. In the night, we had had snow and blowing wind. The snow had piled thick and heavy against the screen door. I squeezed my way out, cautiously because of the thick ice that lay buried and ready to trip me up.
It was still snowing heavily. And there was a strong wind. The car, once cleaned off from as much snow as I could manage, inched its way down the steep drive through drift after drift. If it had not been a Jeep, I would never have made it. Mini lay covered in snow, hiding as a child who pulls up the covers tightly upon hearing mother’s “time to get up.”
The roads were not ploughed. Indeed, at times I was not really sure where the road was. But at half my usual speed, and in 4-wheel drive, I made it to the station just as the train pulled in. The day progressed as work days will, and soon it was time to head to the station for my journey home. I was tired.
I sat in a seat on the crowded train beside a man who was busy working on his laptop and talking on his i-phone at the same time. I could tell that a domestic dispute had erupted, and I uncomfortably shifted in my seat, pretending I was asleep.
The drive home was fine, but I dreaded what I might find upon my approach to our lane. And find it I did. A bank of heavy snow blocked the steep driveway. Beyond that was drift after drift of deep snow. There was no passage for even this Jeep.

I parked the car on the road and trudged up the hill to the shed, where our trusty snow-blower finds its home. It is now eighteen years old, but it has been well and regularly maintained and has served us well.

Yes, I was already exhausted. I would have preferred to head inside to light the fire and prepare my supper. But this monumental task had to be done first. The news on the car radio had been calling for freezing rain. An anathema. For even this mighty snow machine would not traverse thick and wet or icy mounds of snow.

But what sounds to be drudgery was anything but. It had turned into a dark and starry night. The moon was just rising. The wind had ceased. The air was crisp and the atmosphere clean and silent. Absolutely silent, for the snow muffled any distant traffic.

It took me a little more than an hour of up and down the hill, and a little more with a shovel to tidy up the evening’s labour. Then the Jeep glided up the hill, with a pristine wall of snow on either side. Yes, this had been a tiring end to a tiring day. But it had also been invigorating. A day spent sitting in car, on train and at one’ desk, on train again and in car yet again is death to energy. I had, however, rediscovered my energy, and now I was ready to go inside to a fire waiting to be lit and a supper waiting, at this late time, to be poured from a cereal box. And it felt good. Very good.