Our winter begins sometime in February always. Now it has snowed here. Savagely. But I am taken care of. Odd that. I only worry about reality. I don't worry about possibilities or what ifs. Tons of snow: I worry. I look out at it and worry who is going to take care of the massive might of it, carelessly drifted into high unclimbable barriers, rendering egress impossible for car or human.
Pat comes along with his plough once the last flake has floated to earth. How he knows this, I'm not sure. I call it magic. He did this at 9 or so last night.
And Leo comes along with a bright red shovel at 10 this morning and frees up the garage that has a two foot high snow drift in front of it and corrects my dismal attempts to smooth a path from my backdoor in order to let the dog out.
See what I mean?
And now it's pelting down this kind of fog-rain-snow mix, bitter tiny flakes of icy fog coming down in a thick curtain. But I'll be taken care of. This I believe.
I do a little shoveling for the dog but having seen a 33 year old man drop dead in front of me one time as he shovelled I have tremendous respect for the effects of this strenuous activity on the heart. Especially at my age.
So today? I bake bread, I simmer a stew in the ancient old crockpot, I re-edit another 100 pages of a book that someone is interested in, I look at the really rather lovely afghan I am working on (pictures to follow in a week or so) and ponder the wise words of a friend on the phone yesterday:
"Why do we wait for bad weather to give ourselves the permission to do exactly what we want to do and have the kind of day we truly want?"
So yes, I am disciplined but in a good hunkery way. The house is full of the smell of freshly baked bread mingled with the aroma of the stew, in between I'm reading a most fabulous book - more on that later too - and my knitting beckons for later on.
Hunkering is excellent. It doesn't need bad weather.
At all.
