Saturday morning, in need of my ash bucket, I walk through sprinkles of the first snow. The snow litters the grass that’s yet green, a few dandelions folded closed, their gold hearts not fully hidden.
I’ve been here before, first snow. I hold the bucket in my gloved hand and take in the apples that still cling to the upper branches of a tree, the seedy compass flower heads. The cold is more a curiosity than anything else. So much more to come.
In this not-the-gardening season, I force myself to rally, sweep away the gloom that descends with these short and increasingly shortening days. In my house, there’s a steady influx of books, which I love. These steadily accumulate, so I pack up a few books. Then I stuff the shelf at the top of my stairs. The Céline I read as an undergraduate, Melville and Smiley and Hesse.
In my house, there’s three bedrooms on the second floor. Two small rooms, a third that was once been four, but a wall was removed years before I bought the house. My daughter’s room, before she moved onto college and a good grownup life. In the dreary afternoon, I rally and buy paint. When the young woman at the hardware store opens the can she’s just mixed, she studies the color, then pronounces, “It’s pretty,” which is all I’m seeking.
It’s this strange thing about living a human life—the only movement is forward, and yet we carry the past with us, in backpacks and pockets, our hearts and bone marrow. Later, with neighbors and friends, I walk through the village lit by store and restaurant lights, the white and colored twinkling bulbs strung through trees. At another long table, in a warmly lit school cafeteria, we swap house stories: plastering, where to score free wood, who has what tool.
By now, we are acclimating, and the walk home is not so cold. I take off my hat. For a few moments, I stand again outside my house, breathing in the cold wet, releasing my thoughts, letting go of these little things that stitch our lives together—drinking tea together, talking—and the immense underpinnings—the mystifying frailty of human relationships, fate’s dice.
A cat presses his paw against the window, but I keep standing there, staring into my own house.
I have always believed, and I still believe, that whatever good or bad fortune may come our way we can always give it meaning and transform it into something of value.
― Hermann Hesse
