November
November scored first this season with one power outage, one tree down across the driveway, and five inches of snow.
The outage happened while we were away for the night, which made it impossible to know how long it lasted. When we got inside, the cabin was cold, in the low fifties, so it had been a while with outside temperatures in the forties.
Without fail, it takes me a few beats to realize the power is off when I encounter it after an absence. We arrived in the dark and expected mostly darkness; it was seriously dark—even at six o’clock, a moonless, cloudy night. But there were a couple of clues that should have tipped me off. One was the red trouble light on the generator, obvious as we turned into the driveway. I said to my wife, ‘Rats, the generator is down,’ without being instantly aware it meant down trying to restore power. The front porch light was the other clue. I said, ‘Rats, I thought I left the porch light on,’ failing to connect no light with red light, meaning no power. I treated each clue as a separate incident. I gathered bags from the back of the car while my wife fumbled in the dark for the garage light switch. ‘We’re out of power,’ she said, finally connecting all the dots.
The tree fell while we were walking Huckleberry. We strolled out the driveway free and clear; when we returned half an hour later our passage was blocked. It was windy at the time, gusting to forty miles an hour, which always puts me on edge. So many trees lead a hardscrabble life. I am often overwhelmed by the overcrowding and disease that can afflict them, and every windstorm takes out a few. The fallen tree was rotten in the center from top to bottom. A careful study of its canopy may have revealed the distress, but I walk so as not to trip and fall, with my eyes down or forward. This tree had had enough, and over it went. We did the only decent thing: cut it up, split and stacked it, making us competitors with the woodland creatures that would have harvested the tree for food or shelter. But I imagine the tree feeling better about being converted to firewood, rather than peat. I mean, those are the instructions I have left for when I topple over.
As I have probably described, people around here are anticipating winter by at least August. The clearest sign is the piles of firewood delivered to driveways. If you purchase wood much later, it will likely be green. New people to the area learn that quickly. Apart from smoldering fires, they bear the indignity of late-arriving wood piles obvious from the road. (Unavoidable, of course, if that is how the real estate dominoes fell.) It reminds me that, as a boy, I went one summer to a camp in upstate New York with a form of initiation along the lines of those late-arriving wood piles. Within the first week, new boys would be referred to the infirmary to be treated for “earlobes.” The record is silent on what villain stumbled across the fact that fifth and sixth graders are universally ignorant of earlobe anatomy, but the little lambs, such as me, would be led to the infirmary where complicit nurses would decorate their lobes with curlicues of iodine. If you have not been dosed with iodine, recently, I remind you: it does not come off easily with soap and water, only with time or rubbing alcohol.
Anyway, despite the anticipation, the first snowfall results in plenty of scurrying around, compounded when it arrives on Thanksgiving, a holiday with a long ‘to do’ list already. Now, one must add to the list installing tarps around the open shed where the power equipment is stored, buying new snow shovels, fetching traction sand, covering a few pieces of outdoor furniture that, minus snow, have been warm and cheerful places to sit in the afternoon sun, and getting plow stakes in the ground.
It was a race getting prepped for snow and Thanksgiving. But this morning you should see it—white woods, a stripe of snow down the north side of every tree, across each branch, especially the pines, which are robed in the stuff, their arms hanging down under the weight like woodland clerics.
And I saw a moose, a cow, while walking up the road behind the cabin. She was on the ridge twenty yards to the left, aware of me before I was of her, watching me carefully with the slow turn of her head. I wish I had something I could have presented her as a prize for being my first moose sighting in ten years on the pond. A ribbon. I had a pocket full of dog biscuits. I could have offered a few of those.
Rats, why didn’t I think of that?