The Trypillian Pyro
Beginnng Again
Hadn’t slept in a year.
But this was different.
By midnight, I had tossed and turned enough, and rose to peek into the darkness.
Not yet.
The snow was late but looked to accumulate at most, half inch an hour.
That instant was a relief.
It wouldn’t be one of those clotting, blustery storms. At most half an inch per hour, it looked. That meant by daybreak, two inches, max.
The days leading up to Sunday were cold, colder than it had been in twenty years. But Friday afternoon had been pleasantly brisk and sunny like northern California. Saturday morning, the OAT read seven degrees, Fahreheit, and the last day of preparations seemed to sublimate with one unfinished task after another.
It would have to do.
This was different.
It was Virginia, not tidewater below the frost line at Fredericksburg, but that part close to West Virginia, and some winters, it got as cold.
Easy. No bouncing up the road in the seat of a tractor, eyes to the icy blast, snowflakes accumulating in eyebrows, and hot scintillas of ice beating the cheeks.
There was nothing quite like changing out a heavy mower for a snow blade at temperature. The hitch arms were three-quarter inch steel. That brought insensible fingers close to frost bite in seconds, and to manage the clips, gloves had to be shaken off into the tractor seat, all the while imagining what the frigid, frozen, straw-colored landscape of Saturday, would look like by daybreak.
I could wait until first light.
The body relaxed once the threats of doom from meteorologists crystalized into a familiar reality.
Sleep arrived quickly, and dreams.
***
The previous night, all was prepared as well as it might, given time constraints.
Early church had been cancelled: freezing rain was expected…
The chimney, while cleaned a month or two earlier, still needed pointing up in crevasses near the top. The mason had agreed to do it, but would wait for a warmer day.
Thus, the chimney with its two fireplaces, one on ground floor in a room that had been a hillside cabin two hundred forty years earlier, and the smaller fixture on the second floor, had been out of service.
It wasn’t a proper second floor since the back door led out to ground level, but sloped lawn. That was the nature of a colonial dwelling built into a hillside.
There had been no opportunity since May to begin the slow accumulation of dead fall, and split firewood. The infestation for a half dozen years with emerald ash borer, meant the wind had taken down weakened ash, almost all of them in the forest. Stately tulip poplar now dominated the triple canopy.
Downed trees, while cleared from vital routes through the farm, remained motionless hulks in overgrown meadows, awaited processing by the dozens.
It seemed the moment the storm revealed itself early that Sunday morning, was a milestone in my physical recovery, and I could be happy at the job to be done.
****
You might think with twenty-odd winters at this place, summoning sensations and images to mind of snowfall, would be simple.
But every season, there was something different.
It was easy to forget the way the earlobes lose heat and the way powdery snow adds character to a field hat.
And the evidence of wildlife seeking sustenance in a bounteous landscape, now blanketed, frozen and unavailable. Birds immediately appeared directly in the track of the tractor behind, where seeds were unearthed. There were mast trees where they collect, cascading plumes of snow, and the pond where I ought to have broken ice to water them.
****
Powder turned to ice crystals as the storm progressed, and that silent world began to hiss.
It was a good life, a short stretch of plowing until jeans were soaked through and toes tingled with their last moments of sensation. Then, back to the warmth of the farmhouse which had, by comparison, seemed drafty and uncomfortably cold earlier.
True happiness was a fire roaring, or a few reddish embers glowing, a mug of steaming black coffee and a few moments next to a fire we hadn’t lit waiting for repairs that turned out not to be worth waiting for in such a storm.
****