Winter

Winter arrived with a vengeance this weekend. There was not much snow, but it was heavy snow, and winds gusted over twenty miles an hour, causing trees and limbs to fall over the roads and power lines, leaving many without electricity.

In the midst of this, before the end of dinner service on Saturday, Marcia headed home to Hunts Pond with Potter, our golden retriever. Barely thirty minutes later, I looked up from the cooking line, and was Potter back, sniffing his way across the floor on his way through the kitchen.

"Trees and wires are down just before our driveway," Marcia reported. "We're staying at the Inn tonight."

That put me on edge. I don't like leaving my house alone in a crisis. It comes from the ice storm of 1973 (or thereabouts) when I was a boy, which left a good portion of southern New England without power for days. Shelters were set up in the high school, and neighbors evacuated to them with their small children and the elderly. We stayed put in our house. My brothers and I were old enough to carry wood and help our mother tend fires, while my father went room to room all day and night,  carefully positioning candles near the elbow joints of our baseboard copper pipes to prevent them from freezing.

This was in a day before generators, and wood stoves were common in places like southern Connecticut. It was before the talk of global warming. The week of that 1970s storm was bone cold--a half gallon of milk left on our kitchen counter during the night froze by morning.

But we never lost a pipe. Said my father at the time, never leave your property to fend for itself.

So around ten this past Saturday, after dinner service, I got into the truck and headed to the pond with the idea of hiking through the woods to the house, to check the generator, make sure nothing was on the roof, that there was no water coming in. I would stay at the house. Marcia would stay at the Inn.

It was still windy when I set out, and the snow was swirling. The roads were terrible. Halfway up the hill, the state road was blocked on the right by a fallen tree. I drove around it.

The snowplows had been out at least once or twice before things started caving in, so the road to our property was open to the spot before our driveway, where it was, as Marcia reported, impassable.

Leaving the truck in the road with the lights on, I headed into the woods to pick my way around the impasse. Everywhere was the sound of cracking limbs and the occasional crash of something hitting the ground. I got to the driveway relying on my mobile phone flashlight. Fallen branches and tree debris littered the ground. I cleared a few aside. More cracking. The lights of the truck were now out of sight. Then a crash and a thud that you could feel in your feet as something hit the ground to the left of me.  I became conscious of creatures in the forest, in the way you feel something following you through a darkened, empty house.

Then I heard the voice of my father: get back in the truck, stupid.

Winter has arrived, and it tingles. It draws on all our senses. For one thing, a good portion of it is dark. We are compelled to spend more time feeling our way forward. It is quiet. We hear the absence of noise and any small rattle from within it. It is cold, transforming everything--the ground crunches, our breath crystallizes, the water freezes.

Anyone can do summer, we explain to our houseguests at the Inn. If you want the real deal when it comes to New England, you must come in winter. Only in winter can you experience the connection with the place, the hardships that existed in the day and the comforts. It comes from treading carefully over the ice, woolen mittens, scraping windshields, hats, snow down the back of your neck, sweaters, wind lashing the windows, but finally, just when it has gone dark at four in the afternoon, fuzzy slippers in front of the fireplace.

"How'd it go?" Marcia asked when I got back to the Inn.

"I didn't make it."

"Thank goodness you're back. I'll get your slippers."  

Published as part of a collection of Postcards from The Hancock Inn, December 2020