Unexpected Snow

A heavy wet snow covers the hills of home
Weighing down trees as it clings like an icy parasite
Pushing branch and bush low and breaking twig
Smothering the buds of the rhodedendren

Look up the hillside and see tracks of rabbits
Pathways pushed by squirrels awake and hungry
The cautious track... slow step and pause,
Step and pause as a doe wanders along the ridge.

Birds still wake and sing their eternal love songs
Their bright songs barely echo and are snow muffled
Yet they still sing and seek a mate,  a lover, hear them flirt
Incongruous in the snow laden landscape.

Down in the valleys and winding hollers below
Snow has painted cabins, barns and fields
With a stark white brush that makes brilliant
The contrast of worn browns and tired grays.

Smoke curls steady from chimneys tinted dark
By wood dampened by the unexpected flurries
Windows show occasional faces pressed to glass
Waiting to be released to run and play.

The Blizzard of 2008 - Blizzard with a capitol B. is upon me and I am so weary of being indoors. It is the worst in March ever, I am told. The only one I remember being worse is from 1977 when I was in Harrodsburg, Kentucky.

I walked to the end of our neighborhood, down to a tree line to sit under a big oak and watch the snow falling in a cornfield. Vainly I hoped to see deer, or perhaps a lone coyote wandering through in search of food. As I sat the snow was so very heavy. I couldn't see more than 500 feet.

It was wonderful, mystic and scary at the same time. I walked a path that normally would take me 5 minutes... it took nearly 15 to walk down and 20 to walk back. I couldn't see my path on the return trip. I thought of those brave mountain folk who settled the hills of Appalachia, those ancestors of mine who braved the trip and for some reason loved the rough mountains rather than going to the plains of Ohio or the Bluegrass. I used to wonder why they would have their barns so close to their cabins. Today as I reflected, I realized that it served a good purpose, a barn, shed or outbuilding needed to be close in weather such as this. In the short half mile I walked, I found myself off the street and into a backyard before I knew I had wandered. What if they had to make a trip out to get more firewood, to milk or feed livestock? A hundred yards could mean danger on a day like today.

I would love to be in my cabin in the mountains just now. I would sit and watch out the window at the snow, wondering what the world was doing as I sat warm from my stove. Perhaps I would make some bean soup on the top of the stove, letting it simmer for hours. Perhaps I would walk, as I did today, to see the glory of the woods round that little cabin.

Or perhaps I would dream.