Snowshoe

Today we both agreed to stay home. It's MLK day, and while the guys on the radio debated the meaning of the day, we had our own discussion and finding agreement, decided that was that. I determined that I would not spend the entire waking hours getting lost in housechores. BiL has been doing a little sorting of his goods every day, is getting around in the house without crutches some of the time (watch it, BiL, don't overdo!), and is managing more of his own needs. I still get the meals, do the laundry, make the fires, etc, but his healing is coming along so that I feel ok leaving him on his own for several hours at a time if need be. Yesterday and the day before I did just that to complete some needed tasks in town. Today would be different.

After I did just the right amount of organizing my own wayward papers and catching up on cleaning after our waffle breakfast and chili and couscous lunch, I brewed my traditional "hiking" thermos of jasmine tea, strapped on my Atlas snowshoes, and beelined up the slope west of the house. The local dog has run off the day population of moose, elk, and deer, so I didn't have a worry about surprising anything bigger than a breadbox. The snow was a foot deep at minimal, the hiking steep, slow, but delightful powder all the way!

The air might have been 12 degrees or so, the sky, 3pm winter blue. Even tho the snow depth is not enough to complete cover the generous alderberry, raspberry, and serviceberry shrubs, it is enough to be shoe-able without getting hung up. It is so freeing to the heart to find one's way through the thickets of pines, across logs, past pockets of snow crystal growths like window frost gone three dimensional. I gained altitude til I was up on the old logging road, too high to see our house. I took the road downward to my favorite huge log on the west slope. In the summer the log is inviting, but must be avoided as it is home to a myriad of 6 leggeds that would just as soon sample your flesh as they would enemy colonies. In the present season, they sleep and the log is a place to lean against, a snow blanketed sanctuary of silence. I paused there, letting my fingertips feel blood in them again, downing my thermos of tea (sharing a cup with Earth Mom), feeling the shadowed cold kissing the back of my sweating neck.

After checking in with BiL on the walkie talkie, I began the descent back to the house. Midway down I saw the snowshoe tracks of my neighbor, Marion.

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