Invisible

I can’t see the snow as it crosses the huge grey sky or as it lands on the white slope of the lawn.  I can only see it as it slants between me and the dark trees on the hillsides, from the bedroom windows to the east and the living room windows to the west.  We are surrounded by silent snow.  At times it falls so densely I can barely see the nearest hills.  And then there is a lull, and I can almost follow the paths of separate flakes as they fall.  The crows are quiet, and the geese. One of our black crows sits on a fence post but has nothing to say just now.

This is a day for staying home.  I heard the snow plow on Scotch Hill Road before six this morning, and saw him a little later on Gulf Road. But it is not tempting to go anywhere, and delicious to stay home. We have everything we need, and there’s a great peace in being cut off from the rest of the world.

The snow is wet, and with only a light wind it sticks to everything. It outlines the branches and reveals the shapes of the different trees, the birches, the maples, the oaks, in a way that sunlight does not. The pines hold great patches of snow, and their green boughs are nearly black in this grey light. There is a B&B on route 11 on our way to Cooperstown called the Whispering Pines.  Jay wants to know what they’re whispering about. I mis-remember the line “The murmuring pines and the hemlocks” thinking it’s whispering, and I can’t remember who wrote it or in what poem.  My mother knew, and would have gotten the line right.  But happily, I was close enough for Google and it took my whispering pines and the hemlocks and gave me Evangeline by Longfellow:

“This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,

Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,

Stand like Druids of old, with voices sad and prophetic,

Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.”

It goes on and on.  Some of it quite beautiful. But mostly it’s Robert Frost I’ve been thinking of this winter, Mending Wall especially, walking along the remains of a very old wall along Gulf Road.

“Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.”

But today, the upper boulders are covered in snow, and the sun is nowhere in sight.