Snow Silent by Einen Lee

I love watching snow fall. I love the silent blanket it gives the earth. I love walking through it whether snow is falling or the sun is shining glinting off the tiny flakes. I love the sun as it sparkles through drops of melting ice hanging precariously from barren oaks and high firs whose arms extend to take in and create the landscape, creating a wonderland of twinkling lights. I love that I live in the country and don’t need to deal with the blackened refuse of warmer weather in the towns and cities nearby. Here, the snow slowly trickles back into the earth, feeding the rivulets that become streams that become rivers rushing headlong to the sea.

Snow doesn’t happen here every year and it is getting less and less often as time goes by. When I was a child, it snowed every other year or so. Not just a couple inches either. It could get 2 feet deep. We would lose electricity often and had to depend on the wood stove for both heat and cooking. The water pipes would freeze and my two sisters and I had to trudge our way to the spring with a gallon jug for drinking and cooking water. I was about 5 when I was enlisted the first time. I had my red rubber boots on, two pairs of socks, two pairs of pants, two shirts and a coat with a hood. I looked like an overweight penguin. My hands were cold in spite of the gloves on my tiny hands. The spring was less than 500 yards as the crow flies, but the path to get there wound through briars that my dad smashed to the ground ahead of us. We all learned early how to extricate ourselves from a clinging sticker branch.

The first snowfall of the winter was exciting for us. School snow days were always a great event for us kids, not so much my parents. I imagine such times are just as hectic these days as it was back then. My dad was a professor of art at the local university. He still had to get to work unless classes were cancelled. My mom drove our VW bus as the rural school bus. That was before my little brother and I were school aged. We sat in the very back, over the engine, while the school kids took the seats. Looking back, I wonder how my mother felt about that job. I remember my mom had taken a job at Sears on the phone desk. She only lasted a day. She came home in tears. My dad put his arms around her. My parents both worked hard to support four kids.

My parents bought our 30 acres of recently logged land in 1949 for $7000. It was a 3-room house and accompanying outhouse. My dad gradually built on as the family got larger. He built a bathroom first. Then the sunroom, where we had family dinners. This is the table I still have. The table where I was forced to sit until bedtime because I wouldn’t eat my dinner of liver and onions.

The kitchen was also the laundry room. We had one of those two barrel washing systems that made a lot of noise and sloshing. Then my mom had to wring out the clothes through 2 rollers and hang them up outside to dry. When that wasn’t possible, they were hung on one of those collapsible wooden drying racks.

We had an oil heater in the corner. One I knew intimately well. I had just taken a bath and was standing in front of the heater with my towel in front of me. It took me a while to realize my cheek was touching the surface of the stove. I came away with a cup sized burn on my behind.

The next room to be built was the living room where my parents slept on a pull-out sofa. My mother’s piano was along the bathroom wall. We had a Franklin fireplace which warmed our home all winter long. This was my favorite room! We had a huge picture window looking out over the garden with a foot wide bench in front of it. I could slide onto it over the couch back and watch the world outside hiding behind the curtain, fogging up the glass, seeing birds, the dog, the clouds, the rain. And snow.

The living room had a multitude of uses. My dad would paint, standing in front of a big blue easel. I remember watching him paint one picture that is on permanent display at the university gallery. He would have his students come to the house for evening classes. On Sundays he would read the paper while us kids took turns reading the comics on the floor in front of the fireplace. Sometimes I would sit next to him on the couch when he was reading. He would hold my hand and flick my thumb. That was always a special memory for me.

Of course, it was also necessary to gather wood for the fireplace. My dad would saw logs into rounds and then chop them with an axe. By the fireplace he would use a hatchet to make kindling to start the fire. I learned how to do all of it, including making a fire from scratch.

Daddy was always making new buildings for a studio to work in. He built a studio next to the pump house. And then built another just below it. Years later I built a stall for my horse behind that.

My parents own bedroom came next, then the sewing room where my mom did the mending and making clothes for us kids. She had an old black Singer sewing machine that would grind and the material would get stuck in the presser foot. Every year I got new hand-me-downs from my sisters. My very favorite was a corduroy skirt that when I twirled it would swing out like a tent.

Then came the big construction! My dad, getting help from friends as well as child labor, built on an entry way that opened onto the new kitchen and dining room and finally the sunken living room. Another huge picture window and fireplace were in there. During construction I had my bedroom in the area that became the kitchen.Once the kitchen was done, I got moved to the old kitchen where my wall was a curtain. I was about 11 or 12 then. On my 12th birthday, my parents gave me my first Autoharp. I taught myself how to play it in my room, hidden from the world by a drape.

The uses put to the rooms in our house morphed between bedrooms, living rooms, sewing rooms, studios and kitchens. Us kids roamed the fields and trees of our property and the properties beyond. The natural world spoke to me and taught me the value of existence. I learned to bend with the wind, grow in the sunshine, walk in the fields and cross forestland with barely a sound. I witnessed deer tenderly nibble on grass and briars, I heard coyotes and foxes, and watched red-tailed hawks circle in the sky. I had a relationship with Nature that I still have today. I also learned how to be responsible caring for pets, helping my sisters care for their horses until I got a burro which was totally my responsibility. Her name was Rosy. My eldest sister helped me bring her home. It was at least a 10-mile tug and push. Rosy was disinclined to cooperate. My hand was so bruised and sore by the time we finally got home from slapping her rump! We tied her to a tree. She brayed loud and clear for hours until we introduced her to the horses.

One summer my sisters, one of their friends and I went on a trail ride in the Jefferson Wilderness Area. Rosy decided she didn’t want to be pulled uphill, so she turned around, pulled the reins out of my hand and ran back down the trail. Along the way she discarded my underwear and my flashlight. I found my underwear, but not the flashlight. I would ride my little donkey around the neighborhood. At that time, I was still a virgin Mary. When we would jump little ditches, beneath me it felt like she would go straight up, shoot across the ditch and then go straight down! I loved her.

Time passed. I sold my burro. I held my sister’s horse while the vet put him down. I entered high school and got my first boyfriend. He lived only a half hour walk from my house. He had an old 1957 chevy with windows in the corner. He painted it black. One winter evening we had a fight and he wouldn’t drive me home. There was a few inches of snow on the ground and it was snowing lightly. It was ten o’clock. In the country at night, it is pitch black except for the lights in windows and the headlights of passing cars. That night there were no cars. I had my favorite coat on, a calf length faux fur with a hood. It was a warm coat, but it was also a cold night. Back then there were only 5 houses on the 2 miles between his house and mine. It was a ghostly walk home. And it was so silent. Snow silent.

Now, at 70 some years, I look out the same window and watch the trees, the wind and rain, the snow when it comes. We have had a few silver thaws, where our world is covered by freezing rain making sheaths of ice on everything, weighing down bushes, bending trees, often to the point of breaking limbs. Sometimes we would hear entire trees fall in the woods. I imagine it will happen again, just as it will snow again. I love watching snow fall.