Late Winter Storm

Wild weather came Wednesday night, thunder and lightning, rain, sleet, and snow, and the wind blew hard. The house and porch buckled and creaked. Because of the limits of my snow blade, I had to get out early in the morning to plow the driveway before it was too deep. We had already become accustomed to and reliant upon daily highs of 50 degrees, which is the appropriate moment for Nature to shake us by the scruff of the neck, shake us out of our complacency, shake us hard. Nothing's fair. Currier and Ives were businessmen; their personal bank accounts their only reality. One inch more, one hour later, and the tractor would have failed to push the snow off the driveway, but we did it. Alison worked out with the snow shovel, often forgetting the direction of the wind. The cold set in, and we brought in more firewood. The unpaved roads became frost-heaved again, in places looking like photographs from the Shackleton expedition to Antarctica--if you look very closely, that is. The deer and small mammals hunkered down for the storm but then came out the next day. The newly arrived red-winged blackbirds grew impatient with my irregular schedule of putting out sunflower seeds. The year-round-resident Chickadees, however, pretty as ever, have the greater faith.