Snow

It’s snowing today, the big fat flakes that drift down slowly.  Our vocabulary for snow is impoverished.  I don’t recognize a lot of kinds of rain, but there are a lot of kinds of snow.  These fat flakes are especially pleasing to watch.  You can see individual flakes clearly, and they fall so slowly that you can track them. This has not been one of those winters where the snow falls in December and just keeps piling up until spring.  The snow covered landscape has given way to the dead leaves and surprising green grass that have lain hidden below several times.  When the ground is covered in snow, it is full of information.  There are the deer and squirrel tracks, and the delicate tiny prints of birds. Charlie knows that the snow is full of scent where creatures have disturbed it.  I envy his nose.  I can see their passages, but it all smells like snow to me.

We are deep in the routine of winter, walking very carefully where there may be ice, bringing root vegetables home from the farmers market, planning for days when we may not want to leave home at all. We can hear the progress on the remodel going on above us on the main level, so even on the few days when we don’t go up to look in on things, we know the work is moving ahead.  The electrical work is finally finished, so all the things that were waiting for the utility company to do their last bit of work are starting to fall like dominoes.  Flooring is scheduled for February 5, and then the kitchen goes in.  With the electrical done the spray foam guy was finally able to seal up the north wall and the place feels warm and snug.  It’s surprising what a huge difference insulating that last wall made. I like to go up at different times of the day, just to see the light and to daydream about where the furniture and artwork will go.  I already love our new home.

The view from the main level is quite different from our view down here.  The dining room, master bedroom, and guest room look out at treetop level.  Only the east facing wall, with living room windows and one dining room window, look out at street level.  From those windows the traffic, such as it is, on Averill road is at eye level.  When the construction finally gets started on the housing development for Bassett Hospital employees, which will be just past us on the other side of Averill, we’ll actually have quite a bit of construction traffic, and then eventually residents of the 36 units will drive by.  But right now, it’s only Louise Allen’s grown children checking in on her, and the Swatlings at the end of the road who drive by regularly.  The other traffic on Averill is folks going to walk out through the woods to Moe Pond.  And with the trail to the pond either buried in snow or mired in mud, there’s not much of that traffic now.

My sister Tamar and her sweetheart Ryder were here for Jay’s birthday weekend.  It was lovely, as it always is, to have their company.  Tamar let me win one out of our four scrabble games.  We sat side by side on the couch doing our morning puzzles while Ryder read and Jay cooked breakfast.  Tamar is my oldest friend, with Aviva (the baby) a close second.  I have only the slimmest memories of life before Tamar.  I had just turned four two weeks before she was born, when we were all in Israel in 1952.  Our maternal grandparents, David and Goldie, had gone to Israel a year or two earlier to set up house for all of us.  David was an ardent Zionist, and it was his dream that we would help build the new state of Israel.  David died, young and suddenly, of a heart attack, so we accelerated our plans to move there.  Mom, pregnant with Tamar, and Shayne and I sailed to Israel.  Dad followed after he wrapped up his business in the States.

As it turned out, Dad knew almost instantly that he did not want to stay in Israel.  He didn’t have the pioneer spirit or the commitment to Zionism that my mother had inherited from her Dad. My life would have turned out so differently if Dad had been willing to stay in Israel, or if Mom had been willing to end the marriage to pursue her own dream. That disagreement over our family’s future shaped our lives in so many ways.  If we had stayed in Israel then, it’s so unlikely that I’d be watching snow fall in Cooperstown now.