Sun Return

We had an early thaw at the solstice.  After weeks of thin dry snow and temperatures hovering in the teens, everything changed.  A hot rain fell for days before Christmas, washing the snow away and swelling the creeks and rivers.  At night, we could hear water rushing and roaring past the house through what had been a dry ditch a few days before.  Crossing the river, we could see the water swirling only a few feet below the bottom of the guard rail.  The cats sunned themselves on the back porch.  Spring time for Christmas.  Feverish and cranky, Duncan complained, "Why did it snow before Christmas, but not on Christmas? I want to make a snowman!" And then without changing his whining tone, "Why aren't we planting the garden yet?  I want to plant flowers!"

The cold came back at the very end of the year, but not the snow.  The wind blustered and needle ice pushed the brown grass up in crackling hummocks.   Two hours after midnight on New Year's day, someone knocked our the door.  I was alone in the house, with no cars or lights other than mine in the long sweep of the valley.  There was a strange man outside, shivering in his down jacket.  He said he was a tourist from Chicago; his car had slid off the road and he had walked an hour to find my light.  I let him in to use the phone, thinking that any murderer or rapist who walked to my house to attack me that night would have given up to avoid frost bite.  Dave, the stranded tourist, shivered by our stove, apologized and thanked me, made a phone call and apologized, made another phone call and thanked me, made a third phone call and trudged back into the crackling dark, trailing apologies and thanks behind him.

The snow came back in a sudden flurry two days later.  It covered the ugly frozen hills with a gentle blanket, then stopped.  And the temperature fell lower.  When it got below 5 F, the cattle around our house started bawling their displeasure.  It made a strange echo-y chorus around the house, night and day, rising in pitch and volume when the farmers delivered hay.  I listened to it from the bath tub, from the kitchen, and from the arm chair by the stove, snuggling deeper into my wool sweater and thinking of the cattle whose faces froze in the snow in Laura Ingalls' long winter. 

This morning I was lying in bed listening to the disconsolate lowing at sunrise.  I was wondering idly if the cattle were cursing their farmer specifically or the tilt of the earth generally, when Dane said, "I think I know how to say, 'Holy ---k it's cold' in cow."  The implied obscenity came out as a whisper of sympathetic consonants.  I grinned at him, and spent an hour snuggling with the boys in front of the fire before I opened the curtains and let in the glittering blue and white sunlight.