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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

THE RURAL LIFE

When Winter Comes

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Published: December 17, 2004

For as long as I've lived in the country, I've tried to figure out what it 
means to be ready for winter. Every winter brings a different answer. One 
year the chimney gets cleaned; one year the rain gutters. One year I stack 
enough wood to heat us through May, and one year the garden gets put to bed 
properly. But I've never managed to make all these things happen in the 
same year. The only constant, year to year, is hay. There's always enough 
of it, stacked well before the leaves have finished falling. The horses insist.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm always preparing for a different 
winter than the one that comes. When we first bought this small farm, I 
discovered that you can muddle through even a hard winter. The power mostly 
stays on. The oil man comes on a regular schedule. The phone never goes out.

Sometimes, well below zero, the yard hydrants freeze up, but with a little 
heat tape, they thaw again. Even in the dead of winter, the wood man will 
make a delivery, though calling him feels like a sober confession of failure.

The last two winters in the Hudson Valley were brutal. Yet they weren't as 
long or as hard or as dark as I expected them to be. The winter solstice 
comes and goes before the real cold begins, so I always feel that at least 
we have that out of the way. No matter how bitter it gets in late January, 
it won't be getting any darker. The season is always more transitional than 
it seems, as fleeting as summer. Every day is headway toward spring.

No matter how unprepared I am, I always imagine preparing for a winter you 
can't muddle through. It's a deep, wooded season. Time pauses and then 
pauses again. The sun winks over the horizon, glinting on a snow-swept lake 
- just enough light to wake the chickadees.

The eaves are low all around the house that this winter comes to, and I've 
surrounded the entire house with cordwood, leaving gaps for the windows and 
doors. Winter will go nowhere until I've burned through it all.

I have no plans except to rake the snow off the roof after the next big 
blizzard, and carry out the ashes from the woodstove, and read everything 
I've ever meant to read.

Of course, a daydream like this isn't really about winter or snow or 
firewood or even the feeling of having prepared every last thing that needs 
preparing. It's about something far more elemental, the time that moves 
through us day by day. It's an old human hope - to have a consciousness 
separate from the consciousness of time. But it's always a vain hope.

I'll never get that much cordwood stacked, and never need to. Winter comes 
and goes in the same breath, condensing right before your face on a day 
when the temperature never gets up to 20 degrees.

VERLYN KLINKENBORG