And Snow It Did

    At the first snowflakes on Thursday afternoon, I drove my car the half-mile to the paved road and left it there. If there were heavy snow, that road would be plowed.

    By the next morning a three-foot-deep snow had me thoroughly snowed in. The white sublimity dominated. I had no electricity, phone service, or internet. I still had water, on gravity feed from a holding tank, and I had plenty of firewood to keep the house warm. I settled in to enjoy the snow.

    Fortunately for me, the people who own the only other house on the road—John; Ausra; and Ausra's thirty-year-old son, Ugnius, and twenty-year-old daughter, Jurga—are here now. They spend most of the year in Panama.

    Jurga (who has become such a good friend!) has been sick, but Ugnius, Ausra, and I made a reconnaissance walk through the deep snow to the paved road. Time after time, we crawled through downed trees blocking the road. My car was up to its neck in snow, but the paved road had been plowed. Already worn out (I was, anyway), we decided to dig my car out the next day so Ausra and I could go to town and get oil for John's chain saw. Ausra said she could cut up the downed trees, and Ugnius said he could try to create a passage in the road with John's Kubota.

It got worse—bigger trees—farther down the road

    Later, Ausra and Ugnius helped me shovel a path to the woodshed.

     That evening, when I had changed out of my snow clothes, lit candles around the house, and put a skillet of eggs on the wood-burning stove for dinner, I was surprised to hear a knock on the door. Ausra was on the doorstep, her fur-lined parka sparkling with snow and a bottle of wine in her hand.

    Shaking the snow off her hat and pulling off her boots, she told me that Ugnius had told her she ought to go visit that "lonely old lady."

    He meant me, of course, but the description was so far from how I think of myself that it sounded bizarre. Ausra poured the wine, and we had a pleasant candle-lit visit on a snowbound winter's night, as Ausra entertained me with tales of growing up in an orphanage in Communist-era Lithuania and her years working on cruise ships with international crews.

    The next morning I carried my snow shovel down the road to dig the car out. I had just started when a neighbor, Sebastian, drove by, stopped his truck, and got out. I thought he would offer to help me, but he had a better idea. He would bring his monster equipment up in a couple of hours, he said, and clear and plow the road.

    Hallelujah,

    I climbed back up the hill through the deep snow and stopped at Ausra's house to tell her the new plan and to use Ugnius's set-up in his car to make phone calls. Just as I was headed home again, I heard heavy machinery coming up the road. Soon a monstrous machine came around the corner, plowing mounds of snow off the road and pushing downed trees out of the way. Sebastian brought the big old machine right up my driveway, plowing it down to the dirt and pulling the madrone that had fallen over my pump house out of the way.

    He had freed my car from the snow, too.

    Of course, I'm enormously grateful.

    But all that beautiful pristine snow with its deep walking trenches we had made by trampling down the hill and back up again and again. The delightful two-foot-deep tunnels we had been walking through. The deep, soft, angel-white, lovely snow. All ruined! All turned to mud-splattered clumps of ugliness. Oh, I am so sorry! I hate to see a beautiful thing ruined. And all that snow was so beautiful!

    But I am not an idiot. It's good that we can drive the road again. It's good that, after three days, the electricity has been restored. I mourn the loss of the beauty—the snow, the candle-lit table—but I am not so foolish as not to be grateful.

    And, anyway, it is still beautiful out my front windows. And still, every once in a while, it starts snowing again.