Tis the Season-eh?
Set a ways back from the dirt road, turned at a slight angle and nestled into a woodsy hill, the place was postcard picturesque. That house, white with green shutters, an attached barn and a couple of half fallen down out buildings, was a scene right out of Vermont Life magazine. It emitted a personal history—things had happened there and you could feel a kind of life force that had remained long after the people had left.
It didn’t matter to us that the pipes had frozen during the winter and no one had any idea of where they ran underground. Who bothers with details like the need for running water when you’ve found a place that is all but crying out to you for love? The fact that there were banks of snow still covering the front yard in the middle of May should have been a clue that little sunlight reached the area, thus little sunlight to warm or brighten the inside of the place, but we weren’t thinking about that sort of reality. We were poor, madly in love with each other and the idyllic lifestyle we knew we’d find there.
We worked out a great deal with the owner. A dowser found the water pipes. By the first of June, thinking we had found heaven on earth, we were settled in.
Okay…being four to five miles off a paved road adds up to peace and quiet in the spring-- I don’t recall mud season that year. (Must have felt like a romantic side effect.) But come February that peace and quiet can turn into deadly silence—the difference between solitude and downright loneliness.
That dirt road, especially when one is heading out, had this neat little down slope with a twist in it. Three times that winter we had the terrifying experience of feeling the van go totally out of control as it followed the path of Mother Nature’s choice and slipped right into a side ditch.
At first I found heating with wood great fun. Never did get the knock of log splitting, but I became an excellent stacker and was also in charge of kindling. There is nothing like trekking out to the barn in sub-zero weather to fetch several loads of wood. And, what joy when the stove goes out in the middle of the night. It is great when there is only one room that’s warm enough to sit still in (not the bathroom), yet you can’t sit too long or you’ll bake.
There were some wonderful things about that winter, however. The first was the ultimate fulfillment of two of my basic needs… painting and shoveling snow. I had never known how satisfying these activities can be. But, between a season during which the white kind of precipitation never ceased and a home comprised of ten rooms suffering from total neglect, I found nothing compares to the Immediate Gratification of snow shoveling and room painting.
But there was more self discovery to be had as a result of spending a winter in an old place. We learned about Christmas that year. Being poor had started us in the right direction. We had already decided there would be no gifts, but we never could have dreamed up the kind of day we would be given.
Naturally, it snowed. Naturally, we woke to a house chilled to the rafters. We got the stove fired up and huddled around it, sipping tea. What was odd was that we didn’t feel empty or the least bit unhappy—not a bit. We had no tree, no decorations. But outside our windows the chickadees played their games, flitting in and amongst the pines in the snow. A couple of deer walked slowly through the cedars across the road. A snowplow came by with a big red bow tied to its antenna.
I spent about an hour shoveling the drive. After I came inside, I unearthed a box of watercolors and some paper. Sitting at the kitchen table with Sky playing the flute, I painted small winter scenes across the top of four or five pieces and underneath wrote gentle notes to people I loved.
It was beginning to turn dark when we heard the sound of a car pulling into the drive. It was John Wires, who always smelled of wood smoke. A big man, with his gray hair and beard and dressed in bulky layers, he might have been Kris Kringle himself.
“I knew it was important to get that driveway cleared,” I said as we all hugged and John asked if we were expecting company. “Just you,” we told him, “but we didn’t know it.” Then we all sat around and talked about Christmas and friendship and what a lovely day it had been… how lucky we all were to feel free and comfortable.
That was over thirty years ago. We only spent one winter in that house, but we began what remains a tradition. Although much of life has changed for me, Christmas remains a day for quiet contemplation and giving something of ourselves to people we love. Without fail, every year Santa arrives in unexpected guises, filling our hearts with gifts that cannot be wrapped.