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January 20, 2006

A Tramp in Winter

Dust of Snow Robert Frost

The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.

Brilliant sun and biting cold greeted me each morning earlier this week, and I’ve had to curtail my walk with Orion and the dogs to only fifteen minutes in the woods across the road. I held Orion tightly in my arms to keep both of us warm in the single digit temperatures; his face peered out from under a thick hat and behind his mother’s scarf while the dogs tumbled though clumps of spruce still heavy with snow from our last storm and left clouds of fine flakes in their wake.

Monday, we ventured a bit farther to the crest of Wedding Hill, which overlooks the school’s orchard and farm with Mount Washington and its neighboring peaks framing the eastern horizon. The angle of light that morning illuminated the peaks from the southeast, so the details of their western slopes – finely veined with ridges and ravines descending to meet the rising inter-mountain plateau at their feet – lay occluded behind a shadowy subfusc mantle.

At the crest of the hill, the four of us stopped in the still air to listen, first to little more than our own breathing – mine a bit ragged from carrying a little boy who seems far too big for his age (or mine) – and then to the exploratory taps of a woodpecker near the top of one of the maples that border the sloping meadow to the east. I pointed to the bird for Orion, and after a moment, he craned his neck to follow my gloved hand upward toward the intermittent tapping. I don’t know if he saw what I saw, or if he was able to connect the sound with the bird, but he continued to look skyward for longer than I would have expected, perhaps trying to see the tiny figure nearly hidden in a labyrinth of barren branches.

He turned his eyes back to the snow, searching again for the dogs, whose large black shapes are easy to spot against the white ground, even in the twisted undergrowth of the third or fourth generation woodlands around our house.

On our way back down the hill and home, Orion seemed to point toward a tree alongside the trail. Of course, I’m sure I was projecting my intentions onto his own, but he made me look at the tree nonetheless. The red maple was one of the larger trees in the vicinity, and its gnarled trunk of braided furrows was overgrown with a bounty of lichens and mosses. We stepped off the trail to the tree to look closely we’ve passed together at least a dozen times. This tree’s story was seeded in this patchwork of pale greens, browns, and grays, and as Orion and I stood there, I traced my bare hand across the uneven surface of roughly textured bark and smooth lichen, and I tried to tell him what I felt under my fingers – not so much the physical touch of fingers on bark, but the sense of what lay beneath the surface, the stories that encircled the maple’s dense heartwood and that would lay hidden until the tree passed on. For now, I marveled at this ordinary tree while Orion looked at the bark for the same stories I saw and, if nothing else, humored me for a short while before we both walked back down to the house for his morning nap.

While I was finishing one of the earlier chapters of my dissertation, I was also working as a docent at the Robert Frost Place, a small museum in Franconia which hosts an annual poet in residence and a writing program each summer. After closing up for the evening, I would set myself down to write in the farmhouse that Frost and his family had occupied full time between 1915 and 1920, and which has been home to a different resident poet every summer since 1977. Although I wrote by the west window, which was in a newer part of the house, and which did not look upon the mountains to the south, as I sat in the yellowing autumn evenings, I couldn’t help but feel a part of the poetry of the place.

Sometimes, when writing was slow (which was often), or visitors were scarce (which was rare), I would meander along the poetry trail that wends for a half-mile or so through the mixed hard and softwood forest of what remains of the original property. One of the first poems on the trail I could walk to and almost still keep the barn in view was “A Dust of Snow,” which is just about as close as Frost gets to haiku (though perhaps more so without second stanza). It is in the unexpected moment of winter’s day, after days of cold, or more recently, of fierce wind and rain, have forced a retreat inside, that I can find even the briefest of stories to lift myself above the long dark winter nights.

I imagine Frost, whose tempestuous darker moments have fallen under scrutiny among his many biographers, tramping, as he often did, in his winter wood alone, bending under a low-slung hemlock bough, maybe reaching with a stout leather mitten to pull back the snowy screen and steady himself as he stepped across an old fallen mountain ash he chided himself for not bucking up into firewood in the fall, suddenly finding himself surrounded by a cloud of fine sugary snow as a caw caw echoed in the woods and sleek black wings steered off toward his barn.

I see that I’ve steered off a fair bit myself here, but after all of my own tramping through memory and metaphor, I return to the little boy who joyfully lets me take him along on my walks through the winter woods and who started a year ago to let me see through his eyes what I had been missing out there all along.

Posted by pavel at January 20, 2006 9:50 AM

Comments

Posted by: Gina at January 20, 2006 5:32 PM

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Posted by: vic and brenda at January 22, 2006 3:02 PM