After the Snow

It was a lot of snow, but it was light, and it arrived in manageable stages. Three inches one day, three inches the next morning, a heavier blanket the following evening and overnight.

Newscasters made a big deal out of the projected accumulation, with good reason, but a glance at any decent web weather page told a more nuanced story.

Also (as I may have mentioned already) the snow was unusually light. Which is not to say that travel wasn't difficult. We didn't go anywhere during the worst of it, and I noticed at nine o'clock Thursday morning that neither a snowplow nor any other vehicle had ventured down our little street. That's a first.

In the midst of the shoveling, we found time to go out for one or two walks through the neighborhood, and along the way we ran into a few of our neighbors. Returning home from an afternoon walk Wednesday up to the parkway and down through a copse of trees we refer to as "the pines," we came upon our neighbor Barb at the end of the block, pushing snow off her driveway with a galvanized metal contraption that looked like it belonged in a county historical society museum.

"You should get a motor for that," I said.

"This is my Finnish shovel," she replied. "We have a snow-blower, but our neighbor borrowed it, and he isn't up yet. I've got to get this snow cleared off. My husband has some heart issues. We're headed up to our cabin near Cloquet this afternoon."

That sounded like a bad idea to me.

"Up near Cotton?" I hazarded a guess.

"No, that's farther north. We turn west at Black Bear Casino. Tomorrow we're going on to Cook to do some dog-sledding. I've always wanted to do that, and some friends gave us a gift certificate for our anniversary."

"Our family cabin was on the west end of Lake Vermilion," I said. "We drove through Cook all the time."

"That's a long drive," Barb said.

"Before they built the freeway it was five-and-a-half hours. "

Barb is short and stout, with short gray hair and an animated expression. She and her husband have lived in the neighborhood for 45 years; that's ten years longer than we've lived here. Over the years I've seen her a few times in passing, usually planting annuals at the base of the birch tree in her front yard, but I'd never met her.

"We moved in in 1976," she said, "right before the real estate market took off, and we've never been able to get out!"

"Well, it is a nice neighborhood." Hilary said.  "Lots of dog-walkers, and young people moving in recently."

"The neighbors across the street," Barb pointed, "are having a baby. It will be fun to have little kiddies running around again."

The next morning during our daily pre-breakfast walk around the neighbor we came upon Jay Jay, whom we hadn't seen in months. She was shoveling a path across her front yard. "It's for the dog," she said. "He's got to have a place to come out and pee."

A barred owl had paid us several visits in the previous few week, and I asked her if she'd spotted one. Her house looks off into the woods and down to a wooded backwater of Bassett Creek.

"No. What kind of owl did you say? We see a lot of crows."

Another turn of the road and down the hill, we met up with another neighbor, out walking his dog. We've spoken in passing for decades, but I still don't know his name.

"Sorry your house didn't sell last fall," I said. "I suppose you'll put it back on the market next spring?"

"I don't know," he said grimly. "With interest rates going up, I think that window may have closed."

"We chatted with your neighbor Barb yesterday," Hilary said. "She told us they were heading north."

"Yeah, they went up to go dogsledding. People up there love the snow. Snowmobiles and all that. Cross-country skiing."

"We're happy just to go skiing down at the golf course," Hilary said.

"Before I had this dog, I had a Siberian husky. I had a harness, and he'd pull me around on skies! That was a long time ago." He laughed and took another drag on his cigarette.

As we neared the house, we met up with our next-door neighbor Rocky, out walking her little black dog, Dempsey. I didn't recognize her because she was all bundled up—so was the dog, in a pink crocheted coat—and she was walking alongside a guy we'd never seen before. We said hello, and while Dempsey came over to sniff us out, we exchanged a few pleasantries. Then I said, "Who's your friend?"

"This is Steve."

"We're the next-door neighbors," I said. "It's nice of you to come by to help Rocky with the shoveling." He smiled.

Once we were out of earshot I said, "Typical old-person remark."

Hilary said, "Yeah."

Thus does the fabric of a neighborhood develop—a decade, a generation at a time.

_____________________________

We spent most of our blizzard time indoors, of course. Hilary made a great deal of progress on her current bookclub book, a novel based on the life of the goddess Circe. I found myself skipping around quite a bit, which for me is not unusual. First there was The Letters of Rayond Chandler:

"In the long run ... the most durable thing in writing is style, and style is the most valuable investment a writer can make with his time ... He can't do it by trying, because the kind of style I'm thinking about is a projection of personality and you have to have a personality before you can project it. But granted that you have one, you can only project it on paper by thinking about something else."

A few lines later Chandler adds:

"No amount of editing and polishing will have any appreciable effect on the flavor of how a man writes."

A few hours later, while trying to make space for some books on a shelf, I removed a copy of Etienne Gilson's classic Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, intending to take it to the basement. Before assigning it to that shadowy place, I opened it at random and read:

"For Plato, the union of soul and body is the accidental result of a Fall; the soul is shut up in a body as in a prison or a tomb by a violence done to its nature, and that is why the whole effort of philosophy is directed to effect its deliverance from the body. A Christian on the other hand must admit in the first place, that the union of soul and body is natural, for it is willed by that God Who Himself declared that all his works are good: et vidit quod erant valde bona, and no natural state can be the result of a fall."

Then there was essayist Charles Lamb, relishing the no-nonsense approach to card-playing practice of Mrs. Battle.

"This was the celebrated wish of old Sarah Battle (now with God), who, next to her devotions, loved a good game of whist. She was none of your lukewarm gamesters, your half-and-half players, who have no objection to take a hand, if you want one to make up a rubber: who affirm that they have no pleasure in winning; that they like to win one game and lose another; that they can while away an hour very agreeably at a card-table, but are indifferent whether they play or no; and will desire an adversary who has slipped a wrong card to take it up and play another. These insufferable triflers are the curse of a table. One of these flies will spoil a whole pot. Of such it may be said that they do not play at cards, but only play at playing at them."

Hilary and I played a few rounds of cribbage ourselves in front of the fire. And I played quite a few more on the computer in the course of the day.

Then there was Bee Wilson, in Consider the Fork, informing me how a Japanese knife is made and evaluating the pros and cons of a no-stick frying pan. That was followed by the witty and down-to-earth astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson, in Death by Black Hole, sharing such tidbits of knowledge as that the number of atoms in an area of deep space 100,000 kilometers on a side is the same as the number that would fit in an empty refrigerator. Staggering emptiness. I'm glad I don't live there: no one around and nothing to eat!

I finally settled in to a novel by the late great John Berger about a junkyard community on the outskirts of London as seen from the point of view of a stray dog named King.

The temperature was -11 this morning, but the skies were clear. We passed no one on our morning walk. Three deer ran across the road a hundred yards in front of us, slipping and sliding on the de-icer, I guess, though we haven't see the neighborhood owl in a week.

The bright sun looks spectacular on the newly fallen snow.