Month: January 2022

Deep cold has lingered for weeks, though the January sun is strong and already there’s a spring-like quality to the afternoon light, the way it slants across the landscape, across my upturned face, forces me to squint my eyes or simply close them altogether. We’re still a bit lean on snow – the blizzard tilted eastward and left us in its shadow – but the skiing in the woods and fields is excellent and by now I’m well enough acclimated to the weather that even this morning, at an even dozen degrees below, I soon found myself hatless and sweating as I climbed an old skid road deep in the woods just over the crest of the mountain. It was the first time I’d come this way, but already I knew I’d be back, I liked the openness of the trees – sugar maple, mostly, with a scattering of birch – and the contours of the land, rising steep on my left to rock abutments before topping out at what appeared to be a sort of plateau and dropping on my right into a snowed-in drainage where I suspected I could still find fluid water under the snow if I were inclined to go looking. Which I was not. The air was stone still and when I stopped to linger I could hear nothing but the muted noises of my body’s mysterious inner workings: A vaguely electrical hum that’s more sensation than sound, a steady whump, the occasional gurgle. Then back to it, leaning forward to get my weight positioned just right so that my skis would find traction against the slope.

An hour later I emerged from the woods into the full force of the sun and started gliding back toward the road along the edge of a large, south-facing logging cut, mindful of the stubble lurking just under the surface of the shallow snow. Yet the slope kept pitching downward, and the temptation to let ’em run got the best of me, and so I now I leaned back in hopes that doing so would allow the tips of my skis to ride up and over any unseen hazards until I was legitimately going pretty fucking fast with no real plan other than to keep riding it out and trying to gently steer between the more-obvious perils.

Soon I’d reached the bottom (with no ensuing calamity!) and then turned to ski atop the snowbank at the side of the mountain road, now in-and-out of the sun according to the placement of trees, the sensation of cold settling back into my body but even as I thought to reach for my hat, I could see the nose of the truck up around the bend and instead I just skied a little faster.

And that was the last morning of January.

There’s barely any snow. It’s been below zero once that I’ve noticed, and maybe twice more that I haven’t. In the mornings I fry eggs for the boys on the wood stove; it’s dark outside and they sleepily dress for work while I tend to their breakfast. The fire whooshes and the eggs are done so I slide them onto chipped plates. Two yolks intact, one broken, one leaking just a little. Not really broken, not really intact. No one cares one way or another, it’s just a game I play, trying to keep those yolks whole. I’m not too good at it.

They eat and leave. I ski on the scratchy snow, do chores, then drive over the mountain. It snowed a little the night before, it’s still snowing now, in fact, but so lightly you could almost miss it. Maybe an inch total, and yet the old man who lives in the trailer on the other side of the mountain is shovelling his driveway. He’s cleared the neatest of paths down one side of his drive and seems to be working his way back up the other side. The edges of his path are so crisp I want to stop and take a photo. The trailer is old, but clean. It looks freshly painted. The old man looks spry and happy and I watch him in the rearview mirror for as long as I can.