Snow Cover

I'm sitting on a dry dead spruce limb. It's frozen into the pond. My 2 younger kids are crazy for ice skating, so here we are, lacing up on the frozen pond. We explore the inlets and coves and islets within the little island within Penobscot Bay in the Gulf of Maine. There is the sunset. Over there is the hut, collapsed and almost consumed by the woods at the far edge of the pond. Here we are. Lucky. Privileged to be in this natural wild windy fresh place, twirling, gliding.

I've never been to a rink. Only ponds. Dark murky mosquito-y places in the summer. Silver gray places in skating season. We're here 'til dark. All week.

I'm thoroughly out of touch with the water. The ocean and ocean's work is all consuming, until it's done for the year, when it ceases to exist. Now there is the computer keyboard to tap and the woodstove to endlessly feed. Future work to plan. Inside fix-ups. A long trailing list of tasks at least a quarter of which will be on next winter's list unless their malfunction presents some emergency. One thing on the list was a pair of bedrooms.

The two younger kids roomed together in a cozy, basically big closet sized room. The 34 clowns coming out of the vw beetle have nothing on those two. Conventional figuring of cubic feet provides no explanation how all that stuff could fit into such a tiny space. The contents of that room took up the entire rest of the upstairs while I tried to prioritize, give away, strategically save and distribute all the thousands of items- toys, puzzle pieces, disembodied lego heads, fourteen thousand crayons/pencils/markers, long lost jammy bottoms, remnants of smuggled candy and fruit, homework and, of course, a couple of dozen socks that probably were originally sold as singles.

When spring comes, the some of the other single socks will emerge from the dead grass around the yard.

I'm nowhere near ready for that. I need Snow Cover. I need time to catch up and I need the limits imposed mercifully by the season.