On a warm noon when sun strikes the hive, the bees still fly, but it’s been cold enough recently for them to form their winter cluster, a tight, buzzing ball at the center of their store of brood and honey. The flow of information into the hive—and with it nectar and pollen—has dwindled to nothing. In fields and waste places, the stands of goldenrod, the source of the late-summer honey flow, have turned a nebulous silver, like wool caught on barbed wire. I took a few frames of honey for the house but left most of it for the bees because it’s a new hive and, again, because I have no way of knowing how bad this winter will get.
At dusk I stand in the door of the hayloft and look out over the place, at the ridgeline newly visible behind a copse of birches to the west, at the row of denuded sugar maples that ring the pasture. The moon has already risen into a bank of thin clouds that look tinged by firelight, clouds the color of the dogwood leaves. The horses in the barnyard below me show the whites of their eyes while dismantling a hay bale. They’ve been slow to hair up for the season, but now their coats are coming on strong. On the way to the house, I notice that the leaves on the peach trees haven’t turned. They’re still the green of midsummer. Is this an omen? Will this be a balmy winter after all? Or does it mean I should provision the larder—a phrase with a satisfying sound—for the snowbound weeks ahead? I just don’t know.
This time of year the light is always coming and going. Dawn swells until noon, and then, after a brief hesitation, twilight takes over. The sun edges around the day like a fox making homeward tracks along the margin of a snow-covered field. Summer, in memory, seems almost like a plain of sunshine, without undulation. There’s an astronomical explanation for it all—the sun cuts a much lower angle across the sky in late autumn and sets farther south. But it’s simpler to say that at this time of year, in the country at least, emotion and light are one and the same.
This is never truer than on a dark November morning well before sunrise. A few days ago a freezing rain fell. The day began with the clatter of ice pellets against the windows. It sounded like crows dancing on the skylight. The falling ice was colorless, almost invisible against the thicket of bare woods. But by evening the freezing rain had turned to snow, and before long six inches had fallen over a glaze of ice.
By early Monday morning the balance of light had changed completely. All the dark, difficult textures of earth—the matted bogs, the serrated fields—had been smoothed over, simplified. What seemed before to entangle the light now reflected it. Even at five-thirty on an overcast morning the snow seemed to phosphoresce, to reveal the broad contours of the landscape while concealing its subtlest variations. Even in darkness, driving south, I could sense the snowlit dimension of the long north-south corridors of Columbia County.
In the valley that Route 22 follows, each light seemed to weigh in with a different mood. Halogen lamps on a weekend estate picked out every wrinkle in their field of view. The kitchen windows of a farmhouse burned with an old-fashioned, amber glow. Beyond the farmhouse shone a long bank of lights—the windows of a milking parlor filled with cows grazing at their stanchions, the hiss of the milking machines almost audible in the silence outside, where the barn threw its light on the snow.
Our neighbors across the road had to put their dog down a couple of weeks ago. Her name was Molly, and the X rays gave her no hope. For as long as we’ve lived here, Molly and her owners drove the half mile from their house up the highway and onto our gravel road to feed their horses. Molly rode in the back of the pickup and barked the whole way, coming and going, setting our dogs off every afternoon. Molly was a gong sounding day after day, tipping us toward evening. Our dogs would begin to clamor for dinner—sharp stares, deep sighs, contagious grins—and once it was time for their dinner, it was time to feed the horses and the cats and then, eventually, ourselves.
Days in the country can seem formless this time of year. The day’s only shape comes from the light and the weather. The rest is self-discipline, willing yourself to work, willing yourself outdoors into the cold and, increasingly, the darkness. It took a while up here before I could walk down to the barn at night without feeling my skin prickle. At those moments I knew what it felt like to be one of our horses, who take sudden frights in the daytime just for the fun of it. The nearest predator is a birch tree hanging over the barnyard, but the horses always believe the worst. I’ve learned to trust them entirely at night. Their stolidity reassures me now when I walk down to the barn in the blackness. They shift quietly from one foot to another, ease in and out of the run-in shed. They remind me that everything is just as I left it in the light.
When I went out the door last night, it was snowing hard in full darkness, and I was late. The horses were still in the pasture, trying to stand in each other’s wind-shadow. They followed me down to the barn and settled around their hay feeder like a foursome returning to a long-standing game of bridge. Badger, the barn dog, watched us from his kennel. I let him out and we walked up onto the hill that overlooks the barn, the bare maples in silhouette against the barn lights and the falling snow. Another light burned near the pasture gate, and snow seemed to fall only around the edges of the bright globe the lamp cast into the darkness.
Why Badger lives at the barn is another story, a long one. He’s a big dog, half Airedale, half Australian shepherd, and the stream of life flows right through him. When I’m with him I feel like a tributary of that stream. We tromped around in the darkness, the grass crusting with frost and yet softening with snow. This morning we walked up the road and investigated every overnight track. With new snow on the ground, it was as though I could see, for once, what Badger was smelling. He swiveled along the trail of the big fox who lives near here until we cut across a set of deer tracks making for a break in the fence. Once or twice a hunter’s gun went off in the distance. We got home before the sun rose.
To judge by house and yard decorations in the country, Halloween has spilled over its banks and washed away all of October and much of November. In cities the Christmas season as we know it now—an economic indicator with colored lights and eggnog—can no longer be confined, as it used to be, within the month that begins on the day after Thanksgiving. But Thanksgiving sticks strictly to its allotted Thursday, and the power of this quiet holiday is evident in the trouble so many of us go through to get home in time to honor it. There’s something touching about a feast of thanks at which we all find our own reasons to be thankful, in which the feeling is named but not the cause.
The year is getting old and the light weak by the time Thanksgiving comes. The only color in the woods is the green of damp moss and the bright orange berries of bittersweet. There are historic reasons why Thanksgiving falls when it does—matters of Pilgrim fact and presidential proclamation—but over time it’s become the holiday that defines this bare season. By the end of the eleventh month, the year is ancient enough to have shown us its wisdom. We know what to be grateful for by now, or gratitude is simply beyond us.
You don’t have to be very old to remember Thanksgivings that began at four or five in the morning, when women rose alone in the dark to start cooking the turkey. By the time the men and children got out of bed, the bird had already been roasting for a couple of hours on the back porch in its own enameled turkey roaster, a device that lived in the basement all but one day a year, resembled an electric bassinet, and kept the main oven free for pies. Thanksgiving then meant haste in the early hours, a long delay before the big midafternoon dinner, and scratch meals—why eat now?—for breakfast and lunch, a day in which you went straight from starvation to stupefaction, in which men and children felt more than ordinarily useless whenever they came near the kitchen.
Sitting down to the big meal seems like the crux of Thanksgiving, but it really comes a couple of hours later. The pumpkin pie is gone, the dishes are done, the dogs and overnight guests are napping, and there’s a strange vacancy in the afternoon light. For a moment the year halts, a moment when the wakeful aren’t quite sure what to do
with themselves. In that instant, that hollow in time, you find yourself listening to the unnatural stillness of the afternoon, pausing to look closely at the world around you. That’s all the celebration necessary on this most modest, most poignant of days.
December
In late August what snow remains along the ridgelines of the Madison Range, in southwestern Montana, is as gray as a cast antler, and it has the porosity of cruelly weathered bone, almost eaten away by sun and wind and age. Still it’s hard not to think of those snowfields as the nucleus from which winter will come, spreading downward in the night, taking the unprepared unawares and bestowing a kind of small-town smugness on those who got their snowblowers tuned up in July. Seasonal morals—think of the grasshopper and the ant—echo down through folk literature, through the commonplaces of our tongue, but no season carries a sterner moral than winter, and what makes it so is snow.
Some people love waking to the sight of new snow. Fallen snow is fine, but I like the sight of it falling, fine as dust or so fat you can hear it land against the kitchen window. I like the tunnel of dry snow you drive through at night, the headlights blanking out a few yards ahead, and the feeling that you’re driving into some abyssal vacuum. I like the ground-blizzards and the snow that slithers down the road ahead of you. What I like is the visual impairment snow brings with it, the way it obscures some things and defines others, like the wind.
My grandmother Carley always used to say to me, when I was in one of my childhood snow reveries, “You won’t feel that way when you’re my age.” I’m halfway there now, and nothing’s changed. I suppose someday I’ll feel tyrannized by snow, but the truest and the most consistent of all the feelings I’ve ever felt is the one I feel when I look up on a gray day in early December and see that out the window the air has filled with snow, snow as still, as hesitant, as the motes of dust in a morning sunbeam.
It reminds me of a classroom in an old brick school building in Osage, Iowa. There was only one small window, mounted high on the wall near the top of a set of stairs that led down to a dank gymnasium. Through that high window I could see the boughs of some conifer, a Scotch pine or a Norway spruce. Whenever snow begins to fall, wherever I am, I’m in that schoolroom again, watching the flakes balanced in the air against the dark green boughs, waiting for them to thicken and for the wind to multiply them until the snow is so thick that the tree fades from sight, and we’re sent home early. The snow fills in our tracks so swiftly that it’s doubtful we’ll ever find our way back to school, not tomorrow or the day after or for weeks to come.
The urge to quarter the year into seasons is nearly irresistible, whether the impulse is astronomical, agricultural, liturgical, or fiscal. Instead of inhabiting the undivided plain of time, humans prefer to live in the rooms the seasons make, and nearly everyone loves to be reminded of that fact. There’s something gratifying about seeing fall, winter, spring, and summer, the very idea of seasonality, represented, no matter how—in a Herrick poem or a Boucher painting or in the stiff vellum pages of a medieval illuminated manuscript. The pleasure of it is so strong that it must be adaptive, a way of preparing a biological affinity in us for what the calendar inevitably holds in store.
But portraits of the seasons give a tight, iconic view of nature. Winter doesn’t howl into the last stanza of Keats’s autumn, stunning the gnats and swallows, nor does it frostbite the naked toes of Botticelli’s vernal nymphs. Reality is less discrete. There isn’t a secular hymn to a day of unseasonable warmth on the cusp of winter shortly after heavy rain in an otherwise dry autumn, though days like that do come along. The only season Boucher never painted was the one called mud. We live in fact in a world of margins—every hour an occasion of its own—where sometimes the weather and the landscape and the state of the foliage live up to the idea of the very season we say is at hand.
Like most people I’ve been waiting for the big arctic blow to begin—a dark whistling high in the treetops—and while waiting I’ve been visiting the plants that surround the house. They divide into two camps. Some insist on fall and winter, like buckthorn, hung with nearly black berries, and eastern wahoo, a tree whose small, lobed fruits are a mordant pink. But most of the plants I stopped to quiz—climbing roses, elderberry, lilacs, azaleas, rhododendron, blueberries, wisteria, a lone magnolia—are looking patiently toward spring. Dormant buds, covered in bud scales, have already formed in axils and on twigs.
I had always thought of this time of year as a slow patch of death, of stasis at least, in the plant world. That’s the sort of thing you believe when you take the idea of season too literally. The mild fall weather may have swollen the buds a little more than usual, but what it really did was drive me outdoors to notice them. There, at the end of autumn, stood the whole shape of spring, held back only by the still-dwindling daylight, by a keen, continuous apprehension of time.
Up past Pipestone, Minnesota, Highway 23 angles away to the north-northeast, through Lyon, Yellow Medicine, and Chippewa Counties, and through the heart of what for twelve years in the mid-nineteenth century was the Dakota Reservation and before that the Dakota homeland. The last time I was there, it had snowed a couple of days earlier, and the highway was a patchwork of dry pavement and hard, rutted ice, where drifting snow had blown across the asphalt in a warm southern wind and frozen overnight. But now the wind was changing. Second by second the balance of brightness shifted back and forth between the overcast sky and the snow-glazed earth, like flakes of mica mirroring each other.
I had flown over this country two days earlier, and nothing seemed to be moving below me, nothing large enough to leave a track through new-fallen snow. The landscape was nearly as still from the highway. Snowmobiles had run along the ditches, and steers had in some places been turned out into the cornfields, but those were the only signs of movement.
Except for the wind. One family on a farm outside Clara City had put a life-sized Santa Claus on a telephone pole, arms and legs wrapped around it as though Santa were hanging on to keep the prevailing wind from blowing him away like so much topsoil. It was no exaggeration. On the farm I had come to visit, we walked between the house and the sow barn with all the haste we could muster, heads bowed, talking only in the lee. The temperature had already fallen twenty degrees that day, and it was still going down, dropping as fast, it seemed, as the second hand on its way toward six.
I was supposed to return to that farm for supper. I left the motel in the early darkness and headed west out of Willmar, in Kandiyohi County. The wind had risen even higher and was now on its hind legs, a steady gale out of the northwest, and with the rising wind the snow rose too. Sometimes I could see the sulfur glow of lights on a turkey barn or the double halo of approaching headlights. Then the snow thickened, and the highway disappeared into the nullifying glare of my own headlights. Six miles outside of town, in an unbroken whiteout, I turned around.
It was the first time I ever felt the vertigo that settlers often felt when they first came to the prairie. There are many descriptions of it, but here’s what I understood. When the wind blows from the northwest in western Minnesota, it blows from infinity. Northwest is the one direction that goes on forever there, without any barriers, beyond the indiscernible horizon and away to the arctic. Most of the fence lines are gone in that cash-grain country, and there’s no such thing as a tree line, no rimrock or buttes to hold in the landscape. There’s only the sound of the wind skirling down with its endless driven snows upon you.
The snow that fell at home this past weekend was a predatory snow, heavy, wet, and punishing. It fell hastily, clumsily, and by the time the storm ended, there was as much precipitation stacked overhead in the tangled woods, waiting to precipitate, as there was on the ground. It looked as though someone had turned up the planet’s gravity during the night. Under the weight of the snow, every tree, every bush, every wire in sight, bowed closer to the earth than it did the day before. Dead limbs snapped under the strain and so did live ones.
The
day after the storm—Sunday—was clear and warm, but snow continued to fall. The sun probed the woods, and limb by limb, twig by twig, the tree crowns began to shed their burdens. The conifers whose boughs cant downward naturally emptied themselves first, and then, as the wind began to stir, the rest of the trees joined in. The falling snow sounded like an intermittent rain of small rodents falling on the skylights. Out in the woods the dull concussion of wet snow landing in wet snow was audible everywhere, accompanied by the groan of a black birch or a red maple and the sound of snowmelt running downstream. Every clod that fell from overhead trailed behind it a column of snowflakes hesitating in the sun. For a while, near noon, the air seemed overcharged with brightness.
But by evening the comfortable gloom of December had returned. Nearly all the snow in the treetops had slipped away, and with it the illusion that daylight had somehow been trapped in the canopy above. The woods had reerected themselves. Sunset came and went, and all the color in the natural landscape drained away with it. Blue Christmas bulbs strung along the gables of an old farmhouse, or the orange glow of an incandescent lamp seen through a roadside window at twilight, made it plain how utterly the world had been reduced to black and white. The cold came on a little deeper that night, and in the morning the snow on the woodpile was spiked with frost.
The Rural Life Page 15