Winter-at-Last

            The old hippy saying, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it,” implies that I’ll be sorry when I have to walk up the hill in the snow and shovel a snow-path to the woodshed and bundle up in gloves and scarves just to chop a bit of kindling to build my fire in the morning.        

            Nope. I’m not sorry. I wanted snow, and at last I got snow, and I’m happy as a bear in a lair.

            At last I don’t feel like I wasted my money putting studded snow tires on my four-wheel-drive RAV4, and I don’t feel foolish when I drive into town. I feel proud. “Yes,” I think as I pass other cars on the road, “I have studded snow tires because I need them.” I am proud of the eight inches of snow on the roof of my car that announces to passers-by, “See? I live where it snows!” Envy and admiration trail behind me like a “just married” banner.

            I always get a thrill, when I’m driving up the mountain towards home, to pass, a mile and a half before my house, a “snow zone” sign. At last, this winter, I can pass it with justifiable pride, as the snow really does begin just past the sign. Any year, to drive into town in March or April is to move into spring, with fruit trees, daffodils, and flowering ornamentals studding the streets and lawns with color. During heavy-snow, cold-winter years, to drive back up the mountain into the snow zone, where patches of snow cling to the earth and everything is damp and cold, sets me, heart sinking, back in winter. (Yes, I do like spring after a good hard winter). This week I pass the sign and think, “I live in the snow zone.”

            At last, this winter, I can wear my favorite winter coat (fake-leather, fake-fur), and my long wool cloak when I go somewhere dressy. I wear a hat, a scarf, and gloves whenever I go outside not so much because I need them but because it’s so much fun to wear them at last. I change clothes twice a day so I can enjoy my winter clothes more.

            Skiing has at last been good again. “This,” I thought as I skied with the Grants Pass Nordic Club through densely falling snow and finger-biting cold up a mountain, remembering my diatribe about spring too soon (see post on Feb.8) – “this is more like it.”

The next week-end, whizzing gracefully, effortlessly down the trail at Buck Prairie, was like being a winter song on the mountain.

            I didn’t get more than a foot of snow at my house, but it whitened the woods and decorated the trees with its beauty. The flakes were so glitteringly tiny I took a video of the them falling in my woods, one of my favorite sights (and sites). I tried skiing out my back door, but the snow was so soft and fluffy it wouldn’t support my skis, so I walked instead. My feet, in ski boots and gaiters, whisked through powdery snow. The wind blew globs of snow off trees onto my wool hat. After a while I realized I was following animal tracks, more like paw prints than hoof prints: not deer prints, and too small for cougars but too big for squirrels or skunks. I would like to think they came from two coyotes, maybe. I would really like to think they were paw prints of OR 7 or some of his brood, but that’s a little far-fetched. I followed the prints all the way to the creek, ducking under the same chinquapin hanging over the road with icy limbs the animals had hunkered under, walking around frozen puddles with the prints, but walking around another downed tree that the animals could squeeze under but I couldn’t.

I stopped at the creek. The hopping stones across it had snow on them and looked slippery. I could see the tracks on the other side of the creek, but at this point woman and creature parted ways. I turned around and walked back home through the beautiful, soft, pure-white snow of winter-at-last.