I'm getting an overdose of hard reality tonight, packing all my things...having to cuddle cats that will no longer be in my life in a week's time, staring at walls that, in less than two weeks, will no longer be my home. In two weeks time, I will offically be homeless. So, I need to escape for awhile. I don't have a car and I live away from town and friends...and it's after 11, too late for a walk in the rain, in the woods. At least, not these woods.
Back home, in my valley, my beloved sad grey hills of the Upper Hudson Valley, I knew every blade of grass, every tree, every sound, every momvement...like they were a part of my very own soul. But that was so long ago, it seems a hundred years, another time, another life...someone else's life. Not this person, sitting here in the night, alone, writing words to people I'll never see.
I used to love a fresh snowfall. I especially loved the aftermath: snowcovered fields and woods...trees laced with a fresh coating of snow, like the icing on gingerbread. I loved the silence. The stillness of the landscape, like the universe dared not breath, lest it break the fragile spell of the snow-transformed landscape.
Sometimes, it was so quiet, you could swear you could hear the crystals of snow sifting down from the trees. Sometimes the wind would murmur through the Northern White Pines, the bushy boughs, swaying beneath the weight of the snow, a low half-whisper, half-moaning sound, that spoke both of loneliness and beauty in the same breath.
I'd don my snowshoes and tread the virgin snow. I'd trek out to the middle of the field, stop in the middle, look at the tracks behind me. It felt like being the first person to walk a new land, a new planet.
I'd stand there...the deep blue moonlight, casting shadows over the fields, illuminating the trees on the low, rolling, stark bare hills across the river, on the other side of the valley.
I'd stand there, leaning on my hiking pole (a sumac staff cut from my backyard), watching my breath dance upward in the clear air. Breath in the clean smell of new snow and pine pitch.
I'd grab a handful of fluffy new snow, throw it in the air, watch it come drifting down, sparkling like diamonds.
It was like being in the arms of God.
