Fragments From Floyd

We've only driven stick shift cars since we were married. We prefer them. There is a bond that grows between the driver, the road, and the machine. The road climbs, the engine pulls, the driver makes the necessary adjustments, finding the gear that suits conditions that change from moment to moment, mile to mile. And so it is with our lives here in the country. A time of changing gears has happened. We hear the changes, feel them in the engines of our lives, in the smells and winds and in the way the air feels around us.

Wardrobes shift as the season grinds into low gear. Now when we go out, it is not a spontaneous walk, come as you are, out the door in into the woods. Not only must we give care to make the transition from house garb to outdoor garb, but for almost every item, we'll don not one but two: two shirts, two pair of pants, and two pair of socks. We will make each outside excursion count now, will stay outside as long as we can, dream up things to do with our gloved hands before we have to come in and put the process in reverse.

The woodstove, starting today, will likely stay on round the clock, every day, until the January thaw. It is the home heating equivalent of chain smoking: one fire does not go out but helps light the next one and the next. The fire will burn constantly from the winter thaw until the first duplicitous freakish warm days of late March that we know are a cruel lie. The final fire of the heating year will die after the killing frost of May that we thought would not come, and so planted tomatoes the week before. It's all part of the rhythm--the manual transmission of life here--that has become, now in our fifth year, so familiar. We shift our seasonal gears, knowing that four-wheel-drive snow-covered roads lie ahead. We will not always face them happily, but we are ready.

This (reworked a bit, from Dec 2003) is not the piece I was looking for this morning as I put the first large "body wood" into the woodstove for our first all-day all-night fire. There is another, about the ritual of starting the fire--so much a part of our lives in winter--that came to mind this morning, that I want to revisit. I'll keep searching.