Frosty Snow and a Cold Wind

December 14, 2010.  Tuesday.

Situation:   When I go down into the kitchen this morning, it looks like Moi’s again at work on her hunting stories.  The blinds on the kitchen windows aren’t opened; there are dirty dishes in the sink; half the coffee in the carafe is gone.  Woody hops on the table, coaxing Moi to throw his little mousy.  Mway follows me around the kitchen, looking up at me whenever I turn around.  I have to work, both today and tonight.  Outside my office window, I see patches of snow on the ground.  I’m not looking forward to going out in the cold.

State of the Path:  A few steps outside, and the cold is already burning my nostrils, drying my mouth.  I hear the wind – I’m inclined to say “howling,” but that doesn’t seem to be the right word.  I unlatch the chickens’ cage, as Moi told me to do – she didn’t even get around to doing this this morning.  The snow on the ground, encrusted in the hard soil, seems more like frost than snow.  The metal barrel near the walled garden is topped with white, as I see, later, that the plastic barrel down by the creek is as well.  I move swiftly down the main path, keeping my neck and head stiff, braced against the cold.  I hear my walking stick thump against the ground, and it startles me by sinking a couple times into mud around the wigwams.  Mway moves around in jittery movements, sniffing the ground – she doesn’t seem to have any complaint, though, about the cold.

State of the Creek:  I immediately see white ice along the banks of the creek, and as I walk along I find that most of the pools are frozen over, with a frothy but firm layer of ice, thin enough, though, to poke my stick through.  I keep moving fast.  My entire hands are cold.

The Fetch:  Up at the clearing, I start going around the circle – with each toss I hope Mway will feel lazy today and come back without dropping the stick, ready to go back to the house.  Sometimes she snatches up the stick with great ease – if the stick has landed in front of the weeds.  Other times she has to extricate the stick from the clutch of flattened goldenrod or the low branches of a “chokeberry,” stabbing at it with her snout before she can grab it and pull it away.   She follows the various tosses around the perimeter of the clearing, going a few fetches into a third round, and finally – I’m not paying close enough attention to know what circumstance sways her – she brings the stick back, chomping on it.  Although I’m cold, I indulge her a bit and command her to “put it down.”  Twice we play “put it down,” then I tell her “that’s enough.”  As I head down the path through the sumacs, I suddenly come up with the word to describe the sound of the wind: “moaning” -- the wind is moaning.  Yet as I write it, that doesn’t seem like the right word either.