Ice and Fire

I don’t know enough words for white, but as the daylight shifts the white changes from hour to hour, sometimes from minute to minute. We have about a foot of snow on the hill. The base of it fell in the big storm on Monday and Tuesday, but a few inches were added through the week. This morning, just before dawn, the hill was solid white, almost a dull color. The trees on the far side of Scotch Hill Road to the east and opposite on the far side of Gulf Road to the west were all covered in rime, pale grey before the sun rose, each branch outlined. But when the sun cleared the horizon all that white and grey was transformed, sparkling, glittering, almost too bright to look at. The grass where Jay kept it mowed short all summer has been buried since Tuesday morning. But in the fields where he only brush hogged, the taller stalks still poke up above the snow. Each stalk is coated with glassy rime, and as each stalk shifts a little in the breeze the sparkling moves up and down it. The hill is alive with light. I couldn’t do anything but sit and look at it.

Now, in the afternoon, under a cloudy sky, the snow is just white again, with blue grey shadows where Jay has pushed a big long row of piles of it off the driveway. The trees, no longer gleaming with ice, are plain brown and grey, a few of the bigger branches lined with snow. On this frigid day the surface of the snow is smooth, frozen hard. But we’re due for warmer weather tomorrow, and the landscape will change again. In winter our world is shaped by temperature and wind and snow – so different from the warm months when it is shaped by growth in time, by the path from budding through flowering to decay.

In the winter cold the warmth of friends seems more necessary. We had a big, cheerful group up for a farewell dinner for Peter and Aviva on Friday night. They leave for Panama on Thursday, for a world with bananas growing in the back yard where you can actually feel too warm. Hard to imagine from here, where one of our guests had to turn back because cars were sliding off the snowy road. We had the Chases, the Hermans, the Kuzminskys, Mike Quinn, and of course Pete and Vi – a lively group and a fun evening. Peg Quinn didn’t make it, exhausted. The Quinns have brought Mike’s 105 year old mother to live with them after a fall that left her with a broken leg. She had been doing quite well, living in the Thanksgiving Home in Cooperstown, a very nice place to grow old. But a fall at that age changes everything. The Quinns have lots of help, but they’ve turned their lives upside down to keep Mom from the misery of a nursing home. It’s a labor of love, done lovingly.

Last night we roused ourselves to go into Cooperstown for the third concert in the winter series. The first two were terrific, but last night’s was so loud (mostly the drums) that we left just after the second number began, demonstrating that the first number had not been an anomaly. The winter concert series is celebrating its 50th season, lovingly shepherded by a group of dedicated volunteers. Even though this last one was a bust for us, I’m so grateful to the people who make it happen. In a small town, a handful of people can make a big difference for everyone. People have their own little circles of friends and families, but a few volunteers can create a concert series that brings many small circles together into a bigger circle. A few people keep the farmers’ market alive and the film series and now the new Senior Center. For complex reasons, there’s a critical mass in Cooperstown that so many small towns lack. There’s enough energy, enough money, enough interest, enough community spirit to build the institutions that keep us warm through the winter, that connect us to each other and sweeten our interdependence. In the summer, we mostly scatter out into our smaller circles and try to stay out of the way of the tourists. But in winter, the town belongs to the community. We drove home last night happy to be out of the noise headed for our own fire but also happy to belong to a community that keeps the communal fire going.