Sexagesima Snow

If you look closely (or if you can enlarge it) at the photo above, you’ll see a black spot near the bottom, just to the right of the center of the frame. That’s a black bear. I saw him while Jinx and I were out on our walk this morning. The bear was several hundred yards away, loping away from us towards the south, but I knew that if Jinx spotted him, it would be Katy-bar-the-door and every-botty would be kung-fu fighting. I yelled and made silly noises to distract the spotted menace while trying to snap a few pics of the bear. This was the clearest of the ones I managed.

Yesterday’s hours were dry and mild, with skies so blue they could be described as “abrupt.” By the time we fell asleep in front of the wood-burning stove, a soft, pattering rain had begun to fall. Sometime around midnight, the dark alchemy occurred and the rain became snow, and the snow — fluffy and dry, with oversized flakes — began to accumulate. The morning light showed about five inches on the ground, and Jinx looked up at me and said in his Gomer Pyle voice, “Let’s us go for a ramble,” and so we went a-ramblin’.

Back in my Protestant days, I used to hear a common statement from people who didn’t attend church. “I don’t need to be an a building to worship God. I have my own church outside in the beauty He created.” I think some of Transcendentalists and the Thoreau crowd wrote and said similar things. Grim soldier of the doctrinaire that I was at that time, I saw this reasoning as a thin dodge of one’s duties not to forsake the assembling together of the saints. I thought such a statement sounded like sin.

But now that all of the corporate churches of very stripe have forsaken their own flocks in fear of the 99.6% survivable flu from China, and now that I have been lovingly ambushed by traditional Roman Catholicism –“ambushed” is a proper term, as I was taken by it while unaware that it was waiting for me — I see clearly the sense of such statements. And this morning, crunching along in the muffled, silenced world, a panorama as white as a priest’s collar, I felt that I truly was in a cathedral, that the birds were my organ and choir, that the gunmetal sky was my vaulted ceiling, that the leafless, flocked trees were my Stations of the Cross, that I was feasting on the very marrow of the One Who set all these things into place, into motion, into paths through the holy light that allows me to see them. If I can be said to worship, truly worship, then I was worshiping this fresh morning while I breathed the cold fog and listened to the whistle of the coal train over in Dungannon and watched my dog gallop so hard I thought his great and joy-filled heart would surely burst like a thundercloud. I walked and prayed and sang, but softly, so as not to disturb anything.

I looked across field and valley and became aware of all which slumbers beneath the snow. And then I thought, “But does it? Does it all slumber?” Some time later I became aware that I had been disagreeing with myself as I trudged along. It seems to me that in the wintertime, the gorgeous world on which I walk is quite animated in conversation, animated and frenetic in a way that summertime does not require. In the warmth and heat, the elements and animals and green, growing things have no need to talk overly much; they strut and display,  yawning with feigned indifference the way growing adolescents will do, and they put on their best displays with little chit-chat. But in these months where ice sets the parameters and frost is a daily whispered promise, in these weeks of silence and low-slung sunlight and utterly still soil and muted colors, it seems to me that the trees are shouting to each other across the hollows (hollering across the hollers?) while remembering last August and anticipating the coming May. It seems to me that the rocks are aware of what the trucks and tractors have done to them on the roads, and that they smirk and snigger at how they will rise up through the garden beds and erupt like Goliath’s own bad conscience and lie on top of the thin mountain soil and mock the frowning gardener. It seems to me that the creeks chatter as their sinews slide along the rocky banks, and that the cardinals are scandalized at the greed exhibited by the chickadees with their annoying yarmulkes and their smart-alecky calls. It seems to me that the moss on the slopes and atop the rocks call to the voles and the field mice to mind their manners and wipe their feet, and that the wind high in the poplars thinks itself the voice of reason when it warns of the gales and tornadoes of April, which ever approacheth.

I suspect it takes real work to keep the conversation going in these chilled months of daylight shortages and frosty excess. I believe my numb ears were eavesdropping all through the morning miles, and that I must be careful what I repeat, because this is how rumors get started and this is how rocks tumble and trees shiver and bears wake up before the alarm clock sounds and go forth in search of snacks and concerts. All the winter world loves to talk, and it is talking now. Some would think it a mere pleasant coincidence that in one hour’s time, I saw a downy woodpecker, a tufted woodpecker, a nuthatch, a pileated woodpecker, and a flicker. But I know it is no coincidence. The swirling life around me joins together in an extended chat as raucous and show-offy as anything that was ever heard beneath the rafters of an American Legion hall, and those uppity woodpeckers know very well what they’re doing when they strut around on the acres I like to call my own. But mum’s the word and Bob might be your uncle, Time and tide wait for no man, but the cotton-batting snow can slow all of God’s children down enough to get us to listen. And listening is what I’ve been doing all day, and I’m not even close to being tired.

Only a fortnight until Lent begins, but I cannot even conceive of the feeling of want right now. Not with all these riches and all this holy conversation — the bees are sleeping through the best part of it, you know — and the feast of the day, which will go on and on until it is no longer today.

~ S.K. Orr