FACT: Sometimes, Lake Michigan looks like this.
Got your sunscreen?
Not a Word for the Snow
I rise early in the morning, before the light has changed from midnight to the gray that precedes the dawn. A look out the window confirms the wisdom of this. It has snowed—perhaps five inches—and is snowing yet, rather steadily.
I debate the order of things. Coffee? Shower? Shovel? Shower first. If I go out there now I’ll simply have to clean off the car again before I leave.
By the time I am washed and dried and sprayed in place, the light is graying. I layer pants, t-shirt, sweatshirt, two pairs of socks, snow pants, boots, coat, gloves, mittens, scarf. No hat to mess up my hair.
Then I step out into silence.
No cars. No wind. No branches swaying.
No snowblowers.
I lean against the cold brick arch that frames my door, dumbstruck. I have never, even in the middle of the night, ever heard silence outside of my house. My house which stands but a hundred or so feet away from a four-lane highway, from whose windows through the bare trees I can see the exit ramps for the freeway.
And then I realize that it is not quite silent. There are birds. Small voices piercing through the cold, calling me to take up my task.
Then my boots. Then the taking up of the shovel. Then the Scrape.
But even metal on concrete sounds soft, hushed by the snow that fell silently all night and which now shames all sounds. A semi truck lumbers down the highway, but says not a word for the snow.
The gray light eases to pink.
And still no one on my street is about. All sleep soundlessly in their beds.
I ask the snow to move aside, show it a better place to lie. At my suggestion, bare sidewalk appears at my feet and I walk slowly on, up and down the sidewalk, back and forth along the driveway.
And each slow scrape of my shovel wakes one more person in my town.
They do not realize what it is that wakes them, for the sound of it is but a whisper, but when they wake they know they have slept too long, let the snow go unchecked. With each scrape they rise and hurry into their clothes.
I see a car. Then a truck. The sky is white. This city is stirring now and I know my time runs short.
I come to the end of my task and turn to see my great accomplishment. But the bare sidewalk lies beneath new snow that does not know about the arrangement I made with its kin on my slow walk toward the street.
But I haven’t time to explain. I must go in. I must remove all of my clothing and step into something more suitable.
Inside again. Melting snow drips from my hatless head and sweat slicks my back and my neck. I tear away my wet clothes. The house is hot. Too hot. Who turned the heat up so high? Then I remember. I did. I turned it up this morning after leaving the cave of my bed.
And I want to write the silence down immediately, before it escapes, before the magic melts off.
But I can’t. I take up my hairdryer, my mascara, my necklace.
I slip once more out the door.
And all I can hear is an army of snowblowers.
Melt
With a predicted high today of 35 and 42 tomorrow, the icy grip on my town is beginning to ease. Friends are still without power, lines are still down all over my neighborhood, but the end is in sight now. For many, this will be a very memorable Christmas of last-minute plan changes and candlelight and frustration. But years hence, it will make a good story that I bet will get just a little bit more dramatic with each telling.
Encased in Ice
Michigan woke up Sunday to the beautiful phenomenon of ice trees and all their attendant problems–power outages, downed live wires, trees utterly destroyed, roads and sidewalk blocked by debris, and an extremely small (and skewing young) crowd at church.
The sounds of ice-laden limbs swaying, tinkling like glass, then cracking, breaking, plummeting, and shattering filled my ears as I chipped the car from its frozen skin.
After church my son “helped” clean up the front yard by karate-chopping ice from the defeated crabapple tree, which is scheduled for demolition this afternoon.
The ash that had thus far escaped death from emerald ash borers and being hit by a car has been severely damaged. I’m going to have to start thinking about moving plants around in the front, as it will likely be a full sun garden next year.
I’m disappointed that these trees will have to be replaced, but grateful nothing fell on the cars or house or power lines. As is so often the case when the weather turns challenging, we have some work to do. But we try not to miss the beauty that comes with the beast.
On Cold Mornings, Doomed Goats, and Stories Waiting to Be Told
We woke this morning to the shortest day of the year in the coldest house of the year. The batteries in the thermostat had apparently died in the night, making it a toasty 55 degrees on the main floor and colder yet in the basement. A few space heaters (why do we have so many of these?) and a couple new AA batteries warmed things up fairly quickly, and the cold did allow me to see my five-year-old son looking extra adorable in his robe and slippers.
The fairly warm temperatures we’ve been having continued this morning, hovering above freezing and giving a foggy, ethereal glow to the moisture-laden air. The rooftops, the lawns, the roads, and the sky are all varying shades of white and gray. Much of our beautiful snow has melted under the constant rain we had yesterday and I fear by the time Christmas dawns it will be brown rather than white. That’s how it goes sometimes–our ideals and reality at odds.
As time winds down before Christmas I find that I have a couple more gifts to buy, I’m waiting on a few things to be delivered, I have a number of gifts to wrap. I’ve got bathrooms that need cleaning, sheets that need washing, boxes that need recycling. Probably most of this is true for you as well.
More uniquely, I’ve been invited to attend a goat slaughter and a five-hour worship service and meal (at which the condemned goat will be consumed) to celebrate Christmas with my new Bhutanese-Nepali friends. I’m still deliberating on the goat. On the one hand, I am curious about how it will all go down and I feel intrinsically that a writer should observe those out-of-the-ordinary (to us) things. Certainly I would find something of interest to report to you. But I’ve never actually eaten something I witnessed being killed. Seriously, not even a fish. I guess we’ll see how things pan out on Monday afternoon.
Tonight, however, on the longest night of the year, I will not be thinking about goats. I’ll hopefully be finishing up my last short story for 2013. Once that is done, every item on my 2013 to-do list will be checked off and my mind will be free to turn completely toward writing the novel I’ve been researching and musing upon and planning for the past year. The story has gestated and grown and morphed in my mind to the point where I am more eager to write than I have ever been.
I think about the anticipation of the child who would come to deliver his people, of thousands of years waiting for the Word. I think of the people who converged on Bethlehem–Mary and Joseph traveling to be registered, sages making the treacherous desert journey to see the fulfillment of prophecies, angels coming down from heaven, shepherds leaving their fields and flocks, and soldiers dispatched to murder innocent baby boys. And the most important–God drawing near, so near as to become one of us. To feel pain and sorrow and temptation and anguish. To make meaning from chaos. To be both conclusion and new beginning.
The coming together of God and man. The crux of history. The greatest story, which informs all of our small and secondary stories.
Throughout 2013 I told little stories. Now I am ready for a big story.
Winter is here, so why not enjoy it already?
After an extremely snowy weekend, today dawned clear and cold. Oh, who am I kidding? I didn’t actually get up before dawn. But it has been a sunny morning and all the world is covered in a soft blanket of white snow. My Samoyed/German Shepherd mix, Sasha, loves it.
From inside my home office with the space heater at my feet and an unending supply of great coffee, I can enjoy days like this in ways that daily commuters may not be able to. So many of my friends, coworkers, and acquaintances despise Michigan in the winter. Perhaps, when they look out at the snow, they only see this:
Yes, the roads are a bit slick out there, but there are some simple lessons to be learned from winter. Start early, take it slow, steer into the skid, and maybe get yourself some new tires once in a while.
Seems like there might be some writing advice in there too…
Winter isn’t interested in bustling about. It isn’t concerned with appointments or ladder climbing or making a mark on the world, beyond footprints in the snow or an occasional snow angel.
Winter is about waiting, regrouping, hibernating, anticipating. Winter waits for Christmas. Winter waits for spring. Winter sits still for a while and enjoys itself.
Winter says, “Make a fire. Eat rich food. Sip some cocoa. Listen to some music.”
Winter says, “Just as the grass is there waiting beneath the snow, life will still be there tomorrow. It will wait. For now, enjoy yourself.”
Winter says, “I won’t last forever. So rest while you can.”
A Poem upon Finding Myself Yearning for Snow
Come, Winter!
Come, Winter!
The world tires of its verdant hue.
Come, Clouds!
Come blot out the heat of the sun.
Come, Darkness!
Come tell daylight its time is done.
Come, Wind!
Come rip the dying leaves away.
Come, Rot!
Come hasten the last year’s decay.
Come, Snow!
Come bury the garden in white.
Come, Ice!
Come visit my windows tonight.
Come, Winter!
My heart has been waiting for you.
The Past, the Future, and This Unending Winter
Michigan, like quite a large swath of the country, is in the midst of a depressing cold snap the likes of which puts me in mind of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter. We haven’t started twisting straw into kindling or burning our furniture yet, but one can’t help but feel that everyone is teetering on the edge of that kind of desperation lately.
Last year the temperatures in mid-March were a full 50 degrees higher then they have been during the past week. This was not necessarily good, as it caused massive fruit crop failures when temps dipped below freezing again (for example, Michigan normally produces about 96 million tons of apples a year while in 2012 we only managed 2 million tons). But still, I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn when I say that it would be nice to have temps in the 40s rather than the 20s at this point in the year.
Being stuck in this winter is like being stuck in a story. You get to a certain point where you feel frozen. You can’t push forward. You can’t go back. You’re just…there. Waiting for the thaw in your brain so you can get on with it already.
That’s how I feel right now. Frozen in time. Tired of what has come before. Waiting to see where things will go in the future. Ready to move on. But stuck frozen in place.
How do you hasten spring? How do you thaw the fertile soil of your creative mind? It seems clear to me that we cannot rush the changing of the seasons, as much as we might want to. There are plenty of tips and tricks to get beyond blocks, but sometimes maybe we just have to wait it out, trusting that the thaw will come, the waters will flow, the flowers will bloom, and the story will move on to the next chapter.
A Cruel and Gentle Month
Oh, March. You fickle month. You bringer of sunshine and rain, then ice and snow. You can’t decide whether to reveal the toll the winter has taken on the earth or to cover it all back up again. The birds sing, the red-winged blackbirds and robins and turkey vultures have returned, the very first crocuses have bloomed and frozen. The sap and the rivers are running, but I am sitting inside with my coffee wondering just how much longer until I can get out in the gardens and start cleaning up your mess.
Here’s a poem about March I wrote in 2007 and have been modifying ever since. I think I may have it how I want it now.
March
Month of crows
Driven rain in slush-filled gutters
All the flotsam of winter’s rage—
Empty bags whipped in wheezing wind
Parking lot valleys in the shadows of
Mountains formed from filth and snow and abandoned shopping carts
The frail sun pretends to shine
A sudden squall and all is beaten down again
But then
quietly
pushing up
through mud
comes the green
Stretching
reaching
hoping
comes the green
The sun shines stronger
the days grow longer
and all my fondest hopes of spring
see fulfillment in one blossoming
flower
11 Compelling Reasons February Should Just Be Skipped
What if we could go right from January to March? Right from the beautiful snowy newness of the first month of the year to the month when crocuses and daffodils start pushing through the soil? Here are 11 good reasons February should just be skipped altogether.
1. Too cloudy. I have no proof for this, but February seems a lot cloudier than January. If it’s going to be 20 degrees, shouldn’t the sun at least be out? White ground and blue sky look great together. Gray skies just make the snow look kind of dirty.
2. SAD. A large percentage of the population hits the Seasonal Affective Disorder wall in February. See earlier point about clouds. In Michigan we all get even more mopey and downtrodden than normal and the littlest things can drive us to despair. What? The timer on the coffee didn’t go off? I may as well go back to bed for a week.
3. No good holidays. Groundhog Day? Seriously? You do realize that if it just happens to be cloudy on February 2 (see earlier point about clouds) that there will be no shadow–and then spring will still come on the spring equinox. Valentine’s Day? Too much pressure and too much pink. Also, hearts are so ’80s. President’s Day? Just another reason for Art Van Furniture to make irritating commercials.
4. A culinary wasteland. All the indulgent feasting of the holidays (the real holidays) is done. The sudden desire in January for fresh fruits and vegetables in order to start the year off right by eating healthier has worn off, but it’s still too snowy for grilling and eating outside.
5. $$$. You get the heating bill for January and realize that you will now have to set the thermostat at 56 degrees in order to pay your bills.
6. Cabin fever is spreading. Forget the flu; cabin fever is as harmful to the mind as H3N2 is to the body. We’re all getting a little stir-crazy in the north. It’s that time of year people plan vacations they can’t afford and spend untold hours trolling the interwebs for time shares in Florida. We just want to see some green foliage and eat outside again. Is that too much to ask?
7. Supplies are running low. We’re running out of firewood up here. There’s that unsettling feeling in the back of our minds that soon things will get a bit desperate and we’ll be twisting straw together until our hands are raw in order to feed the cookstove like Laura Ingalls in The Long Winter. Okay, maybe we don’t have cookstoves, but we have been forced to buy wood because we’re down to the half rotted wood at the bottom of the pile.
8. We’re getting fatter. Yes, there are treadmills and gyms in Michigan, but what we need is good old-fashioned yard work and ice-free sidewalks so we can get off our big butts and get some exercise. We need to build sheds and trim our trees and mow our lawns and dig in the dirt. We need to take the dog for a walk without fearing that the sight of a squirrel will set off a chain of events that ends with us flat on our backs and in need of weekly chiropractic adjustment for the foreseeable future.
9. We’re desperate for fresh local produce. February just adds yet another month that we have to wait before we can eat real strawberries that taste like strawberries rather than the pitiful excuse for strawberries they ship up from Mexico.
10. It’s getting stuffy in here. Our windows have been closed way too long and despite the fact that we’re keeping up with the laundry and vacuuming regularly, the whole house is starting to smell vaguely of an evil mixture of wet dog, old pillow, and potato skins.
11. Seriously, it’s way too cloudy. I just can’t say that enough.
There you have it, folks–all the valid and compelling reasons we should skip over February entirely and get on to March. So, how can we get this done?
Erin Bartels 
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