Warmer

This is the second pretty warm day, a trend, not a fluke.  We are not fooled into thinking winter is over, but this is a welcome break and it holds the promise of change to come.  Charlie has aged so much this winter.  There’s no spring in his step.  But he does lift his nose into the warmer breeze and he gives his tail a little wag.  At the roadside, last year’s dead leaves are exposed, moist and dark, much nicer terrain for him than the snowbanks which are gone for now.  The icicles have dripped away or cracked to the ground.  Half the deck is visible again.  The deer are finding plenty to eat, and we saw a big flock of geese on the marsh at Portlandville.  It’s a delight to be outside without a hat.

Susan Fenimore Cooper writes about a similar warm spell in March of 1848, a hundred years before I was born.  Reading excerpts from her diary every day I think about what she knew and couldn’t know, and what I know and can’t know.  Writing when she was 35, she can’t have imagined the upheaval of the Civil War that would transform the country before she was 50.  She can’t have known that just three years after this diary was written Isaac Singer and Edward Clark would start the Singer Sewing Machine company that would transform the lives of millions of women around the world and create the Clark fortune that would give Cooperstown museums, an opera company and the amazing gym that keeps us fit and sane through the winters.

My niece, Cadhla, recently recommended a novel, What We Can Know.  It has me thinking a lot about the topic.  It’s set about 100 years into the future, after “the derangement” and “the inundation” have taken civilization backwards in most material respects.  It doesn’t read like science fiction at all, because its focus is on a scholar who is researching a poem written in the early 21st century.  There are so many questions about what the protagonist can know about the time he’s researching, and what the people of that time could know about what is history for him.  With bombs falling in the Middle East, it’s possible to imagine that our own derangement will lead to a great inundation or worse.  But how does that possible future change the choices I make on this warm day?

I chose to walk the trail that goes to Moe Pond.  On the way I passed the Swatling’s, the last house but one before our road turns into the woodland trail. The kids were playing outside in the sun without jackets.  I haven’t seen them all winter.  Unlike Charlie and me, the winter has meant a season of growth for them.  They are taller and stronger.  They run faster and further.  Their joints haven’t stiffened over the winter.  They are full of joy with this break in the weather.

There’s much less ice on the trail than there was yesterday, and there’s water running and pooling everywhere.  Years of living in very dry New Mexico and relatively dry California have taught me to see all this water as riches.  It runs sparkling off the hillside down into singing streams.  The woods are still wintry, but inviting now for dog walkers and for me.  Yesterday a sheet of ice on a shaded slope turned me back towards home, but today there were only puddles to cross.  We can’t know how much more winter is in store, but we can know the joy of walking today.