Snow-Romantic and Real

It's Not Easy Living in the U.P.

I just re-read Robert Frost's poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. He lived in New England so he was used to rugged winters. This poem is on a dog-eared page of his collected works. 

It's 8 a.m. and it's still almost dark. I try to associate this with the Christmas season, as I did as a kid. Going to school when it was almost dark was a novelty. The snow was a novelty, as Frost wrote,  "the gentle sweep of easy wind and downy flake." This imagery revives that wonder, even when It's 5:30 in the morning and I've got to get Lois off to work after a major snowfall. Mother Nature has done a work of art and transformed the landscape into grandness. 

In the U.P. we measure snow not by inches, but by feet. We shovel off our roof-tops in January to prevent collapse. I clear the pristine downy flakes from our woodpile and hit the woodpile with a sledge hammer to loosen the chunks of wood that have frozen together. Then I move the wood into our basement through a little basement window.

My back aches from removing the snow by muscle and machine and tiredness envelopes me. I sit down in my recliner and sleep washes warmly over me. The snow-removal is done, all three hours of it and the wood is in the basement.  Lois watches TV while I slumber.