On a sunny, bitterly cold day in Vermont, the snowpack depths grew deeper as springtime approached. It flowed in soft routes around and over tree trunks, boulders, streams, farm fields and well-worn hillsides.
Beautiful as ever, it was, to all of us.
Our daughter had come home from college for spring break and we had decided to spend the time together, retreating into winter’s encore and greeting spring from the tops of Vermont’s ski mountains.
*****
The daylight flashed sparks of winter’s last light, beckoning us to come walking in the woods, just before sunset on our first day in Vermont. We packed up some appetizers with cold beers and traveled only a couple of miles deep into the forest where we made a campfire and sat, feeling how cold it still was and how glorious a campfire will always be. We had arrived, again, to a second-to-last day of winter. Over the years, the last days of winter had taken us to the world’s most beautiful snowcapped mountaintops. I arrive at those summits, ancient. Yet in all my lifetimes, never have I, nor never shall I, conquer the mountaintop. I am destroyed by the sublime magnificence of being there, every time. My tears barely drop, before the high-alpine air changes them into snowflakes that take flight. I follow them. Some I catch. Some disappear forever.
One of those timeless snowflakes flew from the top of Rendezvous Bowl in Jackson Hole, Wyoming where so many years ago, my daughter and I skied through deep powder snow that buried her strong little body. She had to go potty, now, and the potty was all the way at the bottom of the mountain, 4,000 vertical feel away. “I can wait till I ski down the mountain, Mommy,” she said. I followed her rainbow-shining trail of snowflakes, and have continued to do so, through the stratosphere of times gone by, and into the triumphs, trials, and tribulations of our lives together, today.
A mother slips into such memories, whenever she is spending time with her children.
Our campfire blazed heat, but the sun was setting fast with no moonlight to guide our way out. It was time to break our spare snow camp, and leave the forest. We walked until the trees, blackened, weaved paths to the stars through teal-flavored blues, glowing beyond.
Turning from the sunset, there was Jupiter, though we weren’t sure what we saw. It was a dazzling light acting like the most gigantic snowflake that ever hesitated to fall from the sky. We were lucky. Our feet left the ground at the sight of it and we soared, tumbling and gliding through the final hurrahs of the day.
*****
Every season has its last call. When I sense it’s coming, it makes me anxious. I never get enough and will wave my arms at the heavens, shouting out to, and pleading with, the Great Bartender in the Sky:
One more round!
Winter’s sun moves, the light comes up, and I am at last kicked out of one season and left to go in search of the next.
I nurse the long goodbyes, the indulgent farewells. Like time spent with our dearly beloveds, time within New England’s seasons is a joyful, focused existence for anyone fortunate enough to live a long life traveling through spring to summer to fall to winter.
Nowadays, I awaken to the sun bouncing along the eastern horizon like a white ball pointing out lyrics to a song. Bird song, frog song, flower song. It has been moving from the right to the left, every day, making leaps one-whole-sun-circle width wide. I can’t stop it. Spring is here.
The signs are everywhere.
*****
Of course, one sign of spring is the annoying chirp of grouchy New Englanders. They are sick of snow, ice, cold and dark days. I’m not from New England. But I’ve lived here for a long time, almost forty years. When I first moved to New England, from the sunny southwestern Mexican/American borderlands of Arizona, I noticed that the natives weren’t the friendliest pickles in the barrel. I gave them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they are just unhappy about the weather.
There was a pond on the campus of my university where I went on winter mornings with a pair of ice skates. I went there to feel happy. As alone as a seed cast by wintry winds to nowhere, I skated around my own private au natural ice rink. Next, I thought it would be fun to learn how to ski.
Winter was a long season—as long as all the rest, but colder and darker. It was too long of a season to give over to feelings of dissatisfaction. Furthermore, I made an acute observation about winter in the modern world—we have the technology to be outside in wintertime all day long. High-tech gear suits us up like bold adventurers traveling into outer space—and protects us while we cavort and gavotte—down mountains, through woodlands, and over icy lakes and ponds.
There is a poem by William Carlos Williams. Danse Russe. After I found the poem, I often thought of it while twirling around New England in search of people who knew how to enjoy wintertime. One year, I won the spring skiing mogul competition on Outer Limits at Killington. I was a novice skier and a woman, competing against guys. We revisited those old playground ski trails on the first day of spring with my daughter. I asked my husband to tell it to me straight—had I won the mogul competition because I was the best skier or was it because I skied topless like the guys?
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Danse Russe
If I when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
*****
Or had I won the competition, as a happy, lonely genius, in my dreams?
I am only kidding about skiing topless. And I’ve never entered any skiing competitions.
But our family does have a tradition for engaging in friendly forms of competition when we are out and about outside. We hand out Rusticator of the Day awards to anyone who earns them. The awards are named after the Rusticators of Acadia National Park, who seized the great outdoors while wearing suits and ties and petticoats.
Our competitions are wide open and there aren’t any rules. You never know if you will earn a Rusticator of the Day Award. It is merely an atta boy or atta girl bestowed upon anyone who carpe diems the rest of us when we least expect it.
My daughter is a great competitor for Rusticator of the Day awards. She is a natural source for magic and creative fun.
*****
As I have gone through the last days of this historic winter season in the Boston area, letting it go, muttering prayers of gratitude for such an epic experience of endless snowstorms, I have considered the scorn such a beautiful season, filled with so many surprises, arouses in people. Another William Carlos Williams poem comes to mind, The Last Words of My English Grandmother. Here follows last lines from the poem, about his grandmother nearing the end of her life, while in an ambulance heading for the hospital:
What are all those
fuzzy looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.
I hope to never lose my reverence for the power of life in all its forms.
*****
On the very last day of winter, we were riding the chairlift together, when my daughter pointed to a fat, feathered beast in a grove of trees. “What is that?” She laughed. Everyone’s eyes grew wide with wonder.
Her father said it must be a grouse.
A what?
A grouse. A Ruffed Grouse.
We have lived, camped, hiked, and biked in the woodlands of New England for all of her twenty years. And it has taken her this long to spot a grouse, hiding out.
She earned the Rusticator of the Day award. I’d never seen one, either. When you see something you’ve never seen before, it feels magical.
Which makes me think of the words Hokusai, one of my favorite artists, said before he died:
“If only Heaven will give me just another ten years… Just another five more years, then I could become a real painter.”
But back to the Ruffed Grouse we saw. They are shy birds and they hide in the snow. Their lives often end in violence, because they hold a vulnerable and valuable position in the food chain. The males create an interesting drumming sound with their wings. In wintertime, they grow projections from the sides of their feet which might be a form of seasonal snowshoe. And, Aldo Leopold wrote this about them: “The autumn landscape in the north woods is the land, plus a red maple, plus a Ruffed Grouse. In terms of conventional physics, the grouse represents only a millionth of either the mass or the energy of an acre, yet subtract the grouse and the whole thing is dead.”
*****
In terms of conventional time, my life represents the tip of a blip of a snowflake, in the blizzards of one Solar System’s infinite winter storms, melting in the warmth of a spring breeze.
The thought of it makes me hope to never subtract a day from any that belong to all the seasons of my life, because every one of them is a possible harbinger of unexpected magic.
Magic like the rare sighting of a Ruffed Grouse, emerging from a big New England winter, ready for spring.
Excursions 
