The Wild Marsh Read Online Free PDF Page B

and beauty and peace, that accompanies a heavy January snowfall: the awareness that what to me is simple, exquisite, calming beauty—a blizzard piling up—spells trauma and hardship for another.
    It's going to snow, whether you want it to or not. And it's going to be beautiful, whether you want it to snow hard or not. And there is really just only that one temperance, the concern for the deer, that keeps you, in January, from fully embracing the heaviest snowfalls, and walking out into the forest and looking up at the boughs of the snowy trees and asking for more, please more, even as it seems already that all the snow in the world is falling—still more, please.
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    It closes in. You stare at things longer, in January. Seen from the window of my writing cabin, the frozen gray bare limbs of the alder bower are like a screen, a maze, that transfixes the eye, and hence, the brain.
    The picnic table right outside the window, beneath the arc of those bare limbs, is piled high with snow. The same pattern, same variation in shelter provided by the arrangement of those branches, has resulted in a differential of snowfall that's landed on the picnic table's top so that now, several feet into winter, it appears as if there is a person sleeping on top of that table, a young person, warm in a down sleeping bag or beneath all those many blankets, with his or her head tucked down into the bag for warmth. In the loneliness of winter, such a thought is comforting, and I like looking up from my pages in the morning to see that sleeping form, comfortable, resting, just on the other side of the window.
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    The simple pleasure of brute tasks, vitally efficient, and utterly requisite in January. As one who can fail to execute almost any specific mechanical assignment, leaping instead too often to the impractical dream-world of the abstract, I possess steadfast envy for those to whom such chores seem to come easily, naturally. Perhaps I take far too much pleasure in completing even the simplest task successfully. I once built a crooked clubhouse for my daughters, and every time I look at it, it astounds and surprises me more than any book I ever wrote, or any job I ever held, any task I ever completed. I am not a skill guy, or a closer, a finisher. I'm an ideas man, a big-picture dreamer; I become so easily distracted by all the intermediate steps that lie between, say, A and D, or A and F, much less A and Z. There was never a grilled cheese sandwich I couldn't burn; I don't know how to use the microwave ovens in hotel rooms.
    Perhaps it is for this reason, among others, that it fills me with such joy, on a cold night when the stars burn so fiercely that they seem to moan and whistle, to take armloads of dry, clean hay and stuff it into the dogs' kennels so that they will be warm and clean through the night, warmer than you or I beneath our blankets.
    For the night to be so frigid yet the dogs so dry and warm, without any fire or electricity—and for my arms to smell of the sweet scent of clean hay as I go back into the house, and to be able to go to sleep knowing that all is well, that the task has been completed, tucking in tight and successful—well, each night, this pleases me inordinately. It's almost as if I've warmed myself against the great cold, out there with the stars burning bright. I can lie down in my own bed afterward and be pleased by it—the act of putting new dry hay in the dogs' kennels—for five, sometimes ten minutes, while the stars glitter.
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    Just as warming to the chilled soul in January can be the dutiful act of removing snow from the roof of your house and any outbuildings—generator shed, woodshed, barn—lest the winter weight of all that wet snow, compressing steadily into glacial blue ice, might one day or night as if for entirely mysterious reasons suddenly fracture or crumble that structure as surely and completely as would a meteorite.
    For days, even weeks, you watch