All that glitters

The photo above doesn’t begin to do justice to the sunrise yesterday.  The sky was flame red – red sky in the morning, and we took warning. The school website announced a snow day before the snow even started to fall. The snow started a little before 8:00 and kept on coming down steadily for twelve hours.  It’s different from being in the house on a rainy day, because it’s silent, and really much prettier than rain. And perhaps more mesmerizing because it falls slowly. Usually the branches at the tops of the trees on the rise to the west stand out quite distinctly against the sky.  But there were times yesterday when the snow was so thick in the air between us and them that they were just a grey blur against the lighter grey sky. We probably got about a foot of new snow. It was a quiet, snug day, a lot of it spent staring out the window.

This morning I woke at 6:00, just in time to see the snowplow on Scotch Hill Road, visible from our bedroom in the morning dark.  Dan had plowed our driveway, including the circle around the house last night when it stopped snowing, and it was still pretty clear.  Jay shoveled the back porch and stairs and a path to the back part of the driveway so that we could take Charlie, bundled up and shivering, out to the barn for his morning relief. He will walk in the snow, but his skinny little legs get so cold, he starts limping.  So I carry him to the barn, and Jay manages the gate and the barn door.  Life is just a little more complicated in eleven degree weather and a foot of new snow.

Driving to Cooperstown this morning everything glittered, the perfectly smooth fields and the roofs hung with long, gleaming icicles. The big work of moving snow out of the way was well underway by 8:30.  There were plows and snow blowers everywhere.  In one yard, four young men, brothers perhaps, were shoveling stairs and walkways and the driveway. Their work kept them warm, and they were just in sweaters, hats and gloves (pants and boots too, of course). Their faces were red with work and cold, as were the faces of the men on the plows and the one woman who shovels her own walkway in Hartwick, her scarf pulled up to her nose.

There are a lot of beautiful old houses in Hartwick, and some really stunning ones in Cooperstown.  They all look perfect in the snow, as if that’s the way they had been designed to be seen. But there are derelict houses and barns too, and these suffer greatly under the weight of snow.  Abandoned porches sag, sections of roof give way. This is harsh country to fail in. And I think of people living in some of those drafty old houses with single pane windows, impossible to keep really warm.  And I think of the heating bills – stunning for us, but not a trade off with food or medicine or gas for the car. Wages are low here, and while some of the cost of living is low, the cost of staying warm, of keeping pipes from freezing, is very high.

At the pool this morning there was half the usual group – probably some folks weren’t dug out in time for class. We stopped in Cooperstown after class and workouts, and I got Jay to pose next to one of the big piles the plows had left between the sidewalk and the street. Where do you put all this snow?  It’s sure not melting, even though it’s all the way up to twenty two degrees.