The Object of a New Year

photo by Nate Gibson

The object of a new year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul.
– G.K. Chesterton

We hoped for some timely snow for a white Christmas but had to be content with a brief flurry that didn’t stick.  Then there was more hope yesterday on New Year’s Eve with more flurries and a few little skiffs left behind here and there, but nothing much.  Instead of snow that stuck, we were stuck with the same old muddy bare ground and dead grass and weary frost-bitten plants.

It is natural to desire an easy transformation of the old and dirty to something new and beautiful:  an all clean pristine white cottony sheet covering thrown over everything, making it look completely different than before.  Similarly, at the tick of the clock past midnight on New Years’ Eve, we hope for just such an inner transformation as well, a fresh start, a leaving behind of the not-so-good from the past and moving ahead to the surely-it’ll-be-better in the future.

But it doesn’t stick, even if there is a flurry of good intentions and a skiff of newness plopped down here and there.  Even if we find ourselves in the midst of blizzard conditions, unable to see six inches ahead and immobilized by the furious storms of life,  that accumulation eventually will melt, leaving behind even more mud and raw mess.

It isn’t how flawless, how clean, or how new this year will be, but rather how to ensure our soul transformation sticks tight, unmelting from within, even when the heat is turned up and the sweat drips.  This is not about a covering thrown over the old and dirty but a full blown overhaul in order to never to be the same again.

I lift my eyes to the hills where the snow stays year round: sometimes more,  with a few hundred new inches over several weeks, or sometimes less,  on the hottest days of summer.  Our new souls this new year must be built of that same resiliency, withstanding what each day may bring, cold or hot.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…within my soul.

Edging Closer for Company

The trees are coming into their winter bareness, the only green is the lichen on their branches. Against the hemlocks, the rain is falling in dim, straight lines… This is the time of year when all the houses have come out of the woods, edging closer to the roads as if for company.
Verlyn Klinkenborg “The Rain It Raineth”

The deciduous trees in our part of the country have all been stripped bare, having come through two rain and wind storms in the last week.  It forces typically leaf-hidden homes out of camouflage and I’m once again startled at the actual proximity of our neighbors.  It isn’t as obvious in the summer given the tree buffer everyone has carefully planted.  Now we’re reminded once again we are not alone and actually never have been.

Even the mountains that surround us from the northwest to the southeast seem closer when the trees are bare and new snow has settled on their steep shoulders.

We think we have autonomy all wrapped up but it takes the storms of autumn to remind us we are unwrapped and vulnerable, stark naked, in desperate need of company when darkness comes early, the snow flies and the lights flicker.

Responding

photo by Josh Scholten

And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?“
~Mary Oliver

Some mornings it is impossible to stay a silent observer of the world.  It demands a response.
The overnight wind and rain have pulled down nearly every leaf, the ground is carpeted with the dying evidence of last spring’s rebirth, the dropping temperatures robing the surrounding foothills and peaks in a bright new snow covering.

There can be no complacency in witnessing this startling transition in progress.   It blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries. Nothing remains as it was.

And here I am, alive.
Awed.
Responding.

photo by Josh Scholten

photo by Josh Scholten

 

 

Get My Drift

Snowdrift against barn

As a child growing up in the south Puget Sound region, I never remember wind and snow arriving together to create havoc in the same storm. Each on its own, they could be intimidating enough: the Columbus Day Storm of 1962 blew winds over 100 mph leaving many homes without power for weeks. The heaviest snow fall in Olympia was in January 1972 with 14 inches over 24 hours and three feet over several days–big heavy wet flakes heard to splat as they landed. Many roofs caved in under the burden.

So when I moved with my husband up to Whatcom County over a quarter century ago, I was ill-prepared for the devastation that a snowy northeaster can bring to a community. I had never seen a “white out” before (my family always jokes that I considered the appearance of four sequential snowflakes a “blizzard”), and I certainly had never experienced subzero wind chill temperatures. Now this was real winter–not the pretend winters I grew up with. This was honest-to-goodness prairie-blizzard midwest-sturdy-stock finger-frostbite Arctic blast winter. My Minnesota-born husband considers it no big deal. I believe this is what it must feel like when hell freezes over.

We’ve had a few humdinger northeasters over the years with over 90 mph screaming wind gusts that threaten to pull the roof right off a barn (and sometimes does). We’ve seen freezing rain/sleet storms that cover everything with an inch or more of glistening ice, breaking off telephone poles midway up from the one-two punch of weight and wind. And we have seen drifting snow–in 1996 we had ten foot drifts we needed to tunnel through or climb over in order to get to the barns to feed the animals stowed safely inside.

I was so naive to think I knew winter before coming to Whatcom County.

Today brought significant snow to my old stomping grounds in Olympia, threatening that 1972 record for snow accumulation over 24 hours. We had a mere 8 inches fall here at our farm in northern Whatcom County, which would have been just grand if the northeast wind hadn’t decided to start picking it up and moving it around today. Windchills have dropped into the negative mid-teens and there have been white out conditions on many county roads as the once peaceful snowflakes of two days ago are lifted up and blown miles before they hit a barrier and drop like a rock in growing pile-ups. Snow fences used to be put up every fall along major roads to prevent the predictable drifts from obstructing traffic flow. As there had not been a significant storm in over ten years, the farmers and county public works have not been as diligent. The roads are filling with drifts and our county’s meager number of snowplows can’t keep up. So cars and citizens get stuck, swirled, snarled and overwhelmed with white stuff.

It is now after 10 PM and the county snow plow just showed up to push aside the large snow drift covering the road on the hilltop where our farm is located. He’s been going back and forth for over an hour, just working on the snow on the road in front of our house. Hey, I’m very grateful for the 24/7 shifts these workers are pulling. We might find our mailbox again in a few weeks and so we can go to work in the morning, we’ll be digging out the new mountain of snow on our driveway entrance.

So enough already.

Give me rain. For me, webfoot that I am, that is real winter: sloshing soaking squishy spongy muddy puddles and pools everywhere. It may not be as pretty or as dramatic, or provide great stories to tell to the grandchildren someday, but being a little wet never hurt anyone.

I think you get my drift.

North Whatcom County photo by Phil Dwyer

BriarCroft in Winter

There’s a certain Slant of light, Winter Afternoons– That oppresses, like the Heft Of Cathedral Tunes– Emily Dickinson

She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.
― Sarah Addison Allen

It is winter proper; the cold weather, such as it is, has come to stay. I bloom indoors in the winter like a forced forsythia; I come in to come out. At night I read and write, and things I have never understood become clear; I reap the harvest of the rest of the year’s planting. Annie Dillard

There are adventures of the spirit and one can travel in books and interest oneself in people and affairs. One need never be dull as long as one has friends to help, gardens to enjoy and books in the long winter evenings.
― D.E. Stevenson

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape – the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show. ~Andrew Wyeth

Winter is the time for comfort, for good food and warmth, for the touch of a friendly hand and for a talk beside the fire: it is the time for home. ~Edith Sitwell

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. Albert Camus

In the bleak midwinter Frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, Long ago. Christina Rossetti

Winter is not a season, it’s an occupation.
― Sinclair Lewis

Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people’s legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.
― Sarah Addison Allen

When there’s snow on the ground, I like to pretend I’m walking on clouds.
Takayuki Ikkaku, Arisa Hosaka and Toshihiro Kawabata

The color of springtime is in the flowers, the color of winter is in the imagination. ~Terri Guillemets

Wild clouds lower and touch the thin evening
Fast snow dances in swirling wind.
…With one finger I write my sorrows in the air. Du Fu

No orchard’s the worse for the wintriest storm;
But one thing about it, it mustn’t get warm.
“How often already you’ve had to be told,
Keep cold, young orchard, good-by and keep cold.” Robert Frost

Snow has fallen on the pine-woods,
and every bough has blossomed.
I should like to pluck a branch
and send it to where my lord is.
After he has looked at it,
what matter if the snow-flowers melt?
Chong Ch’ol

Surely everyone is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a wintry fireside; candles at four o’clock, warm hearthrugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies to the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.
― Thomas de Quincey

When the cold comes it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.
― Alice Hoffman

The wind is keen coming over the ice;
it carries the sound of breaking glass.
And the sun, bright but not warm,
has gone behind the hill. Chill, or the fear
of chill, sends me hurrying home. from Walking Alone in Late Winter
Jane Kenyon

Descending the steps into that dark root cellar brought apprehension as well as anticipation. I was uncertain what critter may unexpectedly surprise me on the inside–bullfrog? snake? but the blast of cool air on a hot summer day was always a welcome relief. There was one hanging light bulb in the middle with a pull chain, and once the insides of the cellar were illuminated, a colorful trove appeared from the shadows, lined up on shelves like the ghostly discoveries in King Tut’s tomb.

These were not gilded treasures, but the kind that were lovingly and carefully harvested, washed, boiled and preserved in the midst of a sweaty summer, to be savored during dinners served on the coldest of winter days. The potatoes lay in the cool darkness, not tempted to turn green or sprout, and the “keeper” apples and pears remained firm and tasty. Even in the coldest of winter blasts, the root cellar contents never froze or rotted. It was the best refrigeration system imaginable and didn’t cost a thing to maintain. Emily Gibson

I like these cold, gray winter days. Days like these let you savor a bad mood. ~Bill Watterson

BriarCroft in Spring

BriarCroft in Summer

BriarCroft in Autumn

BriarCroft at Year’s End

Snow Light

Snowy woods on our farm

Roused by faint glow
between closed slats
of window blinds
at midnight

Bedroom suffused
in ethereal light
from a moonless sky~
a million stars fall silent

Snow light covers all,
settling gently while it
tucks the downy corners
of snowflake comforter

as heaven
plumps the pillows,
cushions the landscape,
illuminates the heart.

Snow and Ice Sublime

From Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one of my favorite books of all time–I suspect she wrote this on a winter evening that felt much like this one:

“In a dry wind like this, snow and ice can pass directly into the air as a gas without having first melted to water.  This process is called sublimation; tonight the snow in the yard and the ice in the creek sublime.  A breeze buffets my palm held a foot from the wall.  A wind like this does my breathing for me: it engenders something quick and kicking in my lungs.  Pliny believed the mares of the Portuguese used to raise their tails to the wind, ‘and turn them full against it, and so conceive that genital air instead of natural seed; in such sort, as they become great withal, and quicken in their time, and bring forth foals as swift as the wind…’.

A single cell quivers at a windy embrace; it swells and splits, it bubbles into a raspberry; a dark clot starts to throb.  Soon something perfect is born. Something wholly new rides the wind, something fleet and fleeting I’m likely to miss.”

Song from a Snowdrift

Dear One,

Your rolling and stretching grew quieter that stormy winter night, but no labor came.
A week overdue, you still clung to amnion and womb, not ready.

The wind blew wicked and snow flew horizontal, landing in piling drifts.
The roads became impassable, nearly impossible to reach the safe haven of hospital if labor came.

But your dad and I tried to make it down the road, worried about being stranded at home. Our little car got stuck in a snowpile, so we prayed you would wait, our tires spinning, whining against the growing snow. It took a neighbor’s bulldozer to dig us out to freedom. You floated silent and still, knowing your time was not yet.

After creeping slowly through the dark night blizzard, we finally arrived to the warm glow of the hospital.

You slept. I, not at all.

With morning sun glistening off sculptured snow outside our window, the doctor arrived to start labor but your heart had mysteriously slowed in the night. You were jostled, turned, oxygenated, but nothing changed. You beat even more slowly. The nurses’ eyes told me we had trouble. The doctor, grim faced, announced delivery must happen quickly, taking you now, hoping we were not too late. I was rolled, numbed, stunned, clasping your father’s hand, closing my eyes, not wanting to see the bustle around me, not wanting to hear the shouted orders, the tension in the voices, the quiet at the moment of opening when it was unknown what would be found.

And then you cried.

A hearty healthy husky cry. Perturbed and disturbed from the warmth of womb, to the cold shock of a bright lit operating room, your first vocal solo brought applause from the surrounding audience who admired your pink skin, your shock of damp red hair, your blue eyes squeezed tight, then blinking open, wondrous.

You were okay.

You were brought wrapped for me to see and touch before being whisked away, your father trailing behind the parade to the nursery.

I closed my eyes, swirling in a brain blizzard of what-ifs, knowing if no storm had come, you would have fallen asleep forever within my womb, no longer nurtured by an aging placenta, being cut off from what you needed to stay alive. There would have been no pink skin, nor husky cry, only the soft weeping of your parents knowing what could have been if we had only known, if we could have been sent a sign to go for help.

Saved by a storm and dug from a drift: I now celebrate each time I hear your voice.

Love, Mom

Finding Her Way Home

Papa had been sick for a week. His cough shook our little house, perched as it was in a clearing a hundred yards from a rocky shelf high in the Tyrolian Alps.

Mama was so worried, her face hollow with lack of sleep. She sponged his face with cool water melted from the snow outside.

“Pieter, we must have medicine for your Papa, “ she murmured as she rubbed his legs with liniment to warm them.

“Mama, I can go to the village to the apothecary and bring back what you need.” I said confidently. “They’ll know what will help him.”

“It is such a hard trip this time of year, Pieter. You are only fourteen and there are storms…”

“I know, Mama, I’ll have Dalia to lead me. She will know the way.”

Dalia is our Haflinger mare. She is a sturdy mountain pony, bred in the Alps for just this kind of task– able to pull loads with harness for us, plow the rocky ground, pack with heavy weight on her back, provide warm milk when our cow is dry. Her golden coat glistens in the summer sun, and her heavy wavy white mane and tail are protection against the wintry winds. She is my Papa’s work partner, carrying his wood carvings to the village to sell, and bringing our supplies back on her back. Dalia takes me for rides across the mountain meadows of edelweiss in the spring, and skijoring in the autumn snows.

I harnessed her to the sled and Mama packed a lunch of cheese and bread for me, with a jug of milk. The November day was cloudy, but no new snow had fallen for several days, so we found the trail easily down the mountain path. Dalia picked her way carefully along the ledge, her surefooted amble brisk. I whistled to her and her copper ears flicked back and forth as she listened to my tune.

We reached the village in an hour where our package was quickly assembled and tied onto the sled, and I picked up supplies at the market.

It was time to head back, shortly after noon. I gazed up at the Alpen peaks high above the village, knowing our trip home would take at least twice as long with the steep climb up the trail.

Dalia was eager. She knew the trail home meant returning to her little stall in the snug barn next to the house, and to her 6 month old filly. Dalia leaned into the collar of the harness, pulling the sled up the trail as I sat, reins in hand, not needing to tell her where to go.

The clouds grew heavier and more threatening as we climbed. I urged little Dalia onward, hoping to get home before the snow started. It wasn’t long before the flakes started to fall, first heavy and lazy, and soon blowing wildly around our heads.

“Dalia, walk on!” She tugged harder, willing to try to go faster up the trail.

It soon was white everywhere around us and the snow was deepening by the minute, forcing Dalia to wade through up to her knees. I got off the sled and walked beside her. There was no longer a visible trail, and I began to worry we would lose our way in the blinding snow. I had to trust my brave little Haflinger.

She was soon up to her chest in the snow, pushing her way through, lunging at times to cross drifts. I hung onto her side, clinging to the harness leather, praying she would have the strength to go on despite the bite of the wind.

It seemed as if we were making no progress at all. The sun had gone down, the cold so bitter I could no longer feel my hands or feet. Dalia suddenly stopped, her sides heaving hard. She had brought us to the door of our little house, the oil lamp burning bright through the window.

Mama rushed to the door. “Pieter! You made it back! Praise God!”

“Yes, Mama. I’m back. Praise God and praise our Dalia. She found her way home as I would have been lost in the snow.”

I gave Mama the medicine for Papa, and I took Dalia to the barn for warm bran mash and hay from the summer meadows where she and I would someday ride again. And before long Papa will plow, and carve, and harvest again, thanks to our special Haflinger.
photos from Otto Schweisgut’s books “Haflinger Horses”  published in the 1950s and 1960s.

Delivered from a Drift

Sixteen years ago tonight I was a one week overdue, way too old pregnant lady, staring out the window at a 60 mile per hour northeaster, with horizontal snow.  I was pondering whether I’d be delivering my own baby at home since it was looking more and more dismal that the roads would be passable with the piling snowdrifts.  Recognizing some very minor early hints of labor, I called my obstetrician in town 10 miles away, and begged that I be allowed to come in “preventatively” to the hospital, so I wouldn’t have to sweat it out wondering if I would make it or not in time, or deliver in the middle of a snowdrift along the way.

Our faithful neighbor Sara Watson came with her daughter Kara to stay with the boys, and got quick lessons in how to run the generator if the power went out.  Dan and I set out in the dark, with chains on our little Toyota, and hoped we could skim through the drifts.  We crept down the road trying to feel our way in the white out conditions.  A mile from home we high centered in a three foot drift with snow banks up to 6 feet on either side and sat there, completely helpless.  Dan starting digging around the tires, but it was fruitless.  So he hiked down a long driveway to a neighbor and asked if they had a tractor to pull us out.  Better than a tractor, they had a bulldozer!  Out they came and dozed away the snow around us so we were free to move ahead to the main roads and get to the hospital.  Once there, I was checked and all was well, with no imminent signs of labor so we tucked in for the night, anticipating induction in the morning to get labor started in earnest and finally have this long awaited baby.

In the morning, as they checked my baby’s heartbeat, something was amiss even before induction was initiated.  I had no change in how I was feeling and no serious contractions, but the baby’s heart rate was lower than the previous night with some ominous dips that herald stress and potential problems.  They shifted me around, gave me oxygen but nothing seemed to help.  It was not a good sign and as a family doctor who had done many deliveries myself, I knew it all too well and began to panic.  A quick ultrasound showed a marked decrease in amniotic fluid, another sign of a failing placenta and/or a baby with significant defects, so things started to look even more urgent.  Within minutes, our decision was made for us–the heart rate dropped to a perilous 20-30 and stayed there.  I got much calmer when I knew I had to accept whatever was to happen, as there was no changing the outcome, whatever it would be.  It is not a natural thing for me to relinquish control but in such a circumstance, I was merely the vessel and I had to believe I had the strength to cope with whatever lay before me.  An emergency C section was done and  15 minutes later, Eleanor Sarah Gibson was born, looking pink and vigorous when what we expected was a blue, floppy and critically stressed infant.  Lea, as we nicknamed her,  had given us an early warning that she was one sensitive kid to things not being right, in this case with her blood supply (my placenta was officially declared “senile”–not a nice term to hear when you are 38 ) and 16 years later, she still has a very sensitive emotional barometer when things aren’t quite “right” but I can appreciate it for what it is.

The storm saved her.  Clear and simple.  This nasty nuisance of a drifting-white out-conditions-northeaster compelled me to go into the hospital when I ordinarily would have waited it out at home as long as possible, certainly causing her to be compromised or stillborn as I went through labor unmonitored.  I marvel at this now, pondering these things in my heart.  My daughter knows this story and understands that she is a healthy 16 year old because of a windstorm on that frosty night.  She even knows the exact spot on our road where the “Lea drift” was and the neighbor who helped bail her worried parents out of trouble.  When the wind blows and the snow drifts, we will always remember and celebrate her life when others are grumbling about the hassle, the cold, the inconvenience, and yes, even the danger. She positively beams on days like this, knowing she was touched by the grace of a God that was watching over her that night.  It wasn’t deserved, or earned,  but simply happened.  Too much to fathom and too much to comprehend.

Happy Birthday, Lea, the snowdrift baby.  I love you!!   Mom