nanowrimo madness

In a lame attempt to stop obsessing about Pleiades (I will continue to call him that until he comes up with a better name) I’ve started worrying about the coming winter.
All indications are it will be a doozy. The deer are darker than usual this fall. Old times say that means a bad winter, which makes no sense as a biological adaptation. At first glance it would seem if there’s more snow than usual a lighter colored coat makes sense. Then I remembered what deer do in really bad winters. They gather in herd and trample down an area under trees with edible twigs. They stay in this ‘yard’ stripping the trees of bark and twigs in a natural pruning process. It keeps most of the deer alive and forces the tree into producing more fruit the following spring.
Deer did this in an ancient orchard nearby a few years ago during a particularly bad winter. The following spring there were apples on trees I thought were dead. We had 17 storms that winter. “Amateurish,” a Swedish friend of ours said. When I complained we couldn’t see out some of our living room windows she came back with the fact that she was entering and exiting her home via a second floor doorway. And I’d always thought Swedish cabins with the decorative tiny porches on the second level were cute. Duh!
People who live in snow belts or the mountains understand snow differently from those nearer the equator. People who live in the Arctic Circle are even more cognizant of the nuances.
Did you know the Inuit have over fifty words for snow? I thought it redundant until a winter when we had seventeen snowstorms, one of them officially a blizzard. It gave me new insight. Besides numerous words defining types of snow they can refine descriptions with another 20 or 30 words meaning ‘white’. Inuit people know their snow.
Some storms start sneaky; flakes sifting down while your attention is diverted. Blinking for instance. You may have to squint to be sure it's snowing. Trust me, it is.
Roiling dark clouds and wind herald other storms. That’s when to fill containers with water and bring in extra wood. This is a time travel storm; you're about to experience the 19th century.
During the winter of 17 storms I learned snow evolves according to temperature. Extreme cold makes snow that burns your face. Warmer conditions produce slushy stuff that clings to anything trees, power lines, roofs, and eyelashes. It brings down power lines and glues your eyes closed if you blink.
Then there’s wind driven sleet. That can blast the skin right off your knuckles if your snowblower stalls. It’s a well-known fact that snowblowers will not restart if the operator is wearing gloves. It's in the fine print on the last page of your operator's manual, right under the Chinese word for "Gotcha!"
Friends laughed when we bought a snowblower after five or six practically snowless winters. But we’d been listening to old-timers talk about the winter of '88. They meant 1888. These were really old old-timers. Like them, we knew a winter of relentless storms was inevitable. Weather patterns change.
According to the latest demise-of-humanity sci-fi genre the weather is due to change so radically it will threaten life on the whole planet. The idea is drawn from real life scientists insisting global warming is already disrupting our weather. We were prepared. We bought our snowblower two weeks before the blizzard of '93. We were among the elite few during that storm with a passable driveway. Our driveway was clear but we couldn’t go anywhere. The roads weren't open. There is an Inuit word for that. It sounds like laughter.
Being closer to the environment like Inuit, even yuppie kids are more aware of snow classifications than adults. They speak of sledding snow, packing snow, fort-building snow, snowball snow, crusty snow, and skiing snow. They never speak of shoveling snow.
But they’re right; most winter activities depend on snow type. Cross-country skiing is best on slightly packed snow. Snowshoes will handle almost anything but softening ice crust. Inuit know all about this stuff. They invented snowshoes. They also invented dog sleds. Merlot would rather laze around by the woodstove than pull a sled. He’s deaf remember?
But when Owl and Thunder were little we had a Great Dane named Sky. He loved pulling sleds. The problem was he didn’t understand speed. He moved faster than his brain worked causing some spectacular crashes. Inuit probably have 20 words for dog sled crashes.
They probably also have a word meaning “snow a snowblower can't budge”. There would be several subdivisions in that category, each requiring it’s own nuance: more than six inches, wet snow, slush, ice, slush and ice mixed, you know, anything you couldn’t easily shovel anyway.
Although a snowblower will not throw slush, it will throw a forty-pound rock at least a hundred yards. You’ll find this out if your driveway borders a bay window. Breaking glass is clearly a warning from Snowblower Above. Pay attention here: Never walk in front of a snowblower unless you seek visions. Even a small rock lobbed at sixty miles an hour can knock you out.
Snow thrown from a snowblower deserves it's own classification. Natural snow movement is down. Snowblower- propelled snow defies gravity. It moves up, then down in a graceful arch unless the wind is against you. Then it blows straight back on you.
Trust me, in any given snowstorm the wind is against you sixty percent of the time. There is a word for that kind of snow too, drawn from the phrase “accelerated by machine to twice light speed”. I’d share it with you, but it definitely isn't printable.
Facing the onset of winter is always an ordeal for us. Once it’s underway there’s not much you can do but ride it out and enjoy those rare warm, sunny days. The shortening days of fall are a hazard to our mental well being even when we aren’t working through something like we are now. Raking leaves is a harbinger of worse things ahead. Leaves are a lot more manageable than snow. I forget sometimes that no matter what’s ahead we no longer need to face it alone or endure it in silence. We have people who care about us.
Earlier today Eyvonne was working on the prayer pole we plan to install in the center of the labyrinth. We obtained the pole through a short commando foray onto neighboring property. The aspens over there were just the right size. The ones on our land are either too young or too old. There is a cycle to everything, even aspen trees.
Aspen trees in a given area are all interconnected by a system of tiny rootlets. So in a very real sense they aren’t trees, they’re a tree. If only humans could see the web of connections that binds us together like that.
Eyvonne and I wandered around until the right tree was apparent. It wouldn’t do to cut the wrong one. We cut it down and she carried it back, hefting it to feel the balance of it.
Eyvonne dug a hole in the center of the labyrinth and we placed it to see how it looked.
“It’s already growing,” she said. “It’s alive. I mean not like it was, like it’s supposed to become.”
I nodded. El was ecstatic. We can visualize how it looks when it’s done, prayer feathers spinning in the wind.
It still needed its bark peeled off and it needed to dry for a while before we could paint it. This morning Eyvonne started peeling bark. Soon her daughter Sarah joined her. I wandered out too. We sat contentedly working together, telling stories, jokes.
“You know Sarah this is how it used to be,” I said.
“Lots of people working together makes it go fast,” she agreed.
“There’s that, but there’s more too. When people are working together, talking, sharing things, that’s how culture gets transferred,” I said.
“I can’t wait to go to a pow-wow,” she said.
We plan to put the prayer pole up to celebrate winter solstice. That’s only a month away, but we finished peeling the pole. It’s drying now stretched across the roof of an old chicken coop. Waiting. I have the feeling that like the labyrinth it will bring people into our lives. New blessings. I look forward to installing it more than a kid looks forward to Christmas. Lots of things will resolve then. Like Hamlet told Horatio, there are more things under the sun than I can even dream of and I can dream of quite a few.
The phone rang. I answered it and found myself talking with an old friend. Eyvonne and I had spoken of her earlier in the day wondering how she was doing. It never seemed to fail that she called when we thought about her.
She poured out an epic tale of misfortune. It made me wonder if she was really a family member. She’d found some peace last summer in the labyrinth when things were just starting to go awry for her. I felt the prayer pole tug. I explained about it and invited her to be part of installing it on the solstice.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
It was happening already and the pole was barely an infant.
© 2004 M. S. Eliot