The clock is broken - #112

An ode to my favorite imp: winter.

It’s hard to distinguish the sounds when I first wake up, layered into one another like a symphony of comforts and challenges: the purr of an approaching kitten, the snore of an old dog, the gentle effort of a humidifier, like a tiny little airplane forever on the tarmac, and then, the wind. The blinds are closed, but they’re cinched up to leave the bottom two feet of the french doors bare — the animals like to sit there and look at the falling snow. I can see from bed the diamond dust whipping against the glass in a frenzy, their size and shape a harbinger of the temperature outside. It’s cold, and as my ears begin to discern the individual instruments of the morning, I can feel it.

A new tool was introduced to the house recently — a home weather station. With various sensors and screens, you can be privy to not only the conditions outside, but the ones in. Of course there’s not much point if you live in a modern home. Your thermostat is happy to tell you. But our thermostats are thermohopes and their inaccuracy is somehow heightened by their blocky, beige design. 

One of the new weather station modules sits on my dresser, and in the raging of the storm it reads 57°F in the bedroom. Safe to assume it will be closer to 50 in the main room. It’s a frigid wind slinking into the blanket gaps around my shoulders, and we haven’t yet taped the doors and windows shut. 

We use ducting tape to seal ourselves in. Not the Duck Tape of sticky residue, but the stainless steel tearable tape used for HVAC systems. The tape wraps our framing like a winter garland — the silver shine of it bouncing light from various seams in the room. For it not to look crude, you have to believe it looks festive. And I really have to believe it this year because this year, we weren’t supposed to have it. In the summer, we placed an order for new doors and windows. Except the order was paused because something went wrong with the measuring, and then something went wrong with the only man in the region who knows how to fit doors and windows into long-since-settled, full-scribe cabins, and then something went wrong with my job and so there were no doors and windows because there also was no money. But ducting tape is ten dollars. And we have that.

By 9am, no one has ventured out of the bedroom for anything besides a wee and a water. All four animals are curled up in bed, having each found the warmest possible position in the night and not daring to try anything else. Only the kitten risked losing his spot on the fluffiest of fluffy blankets to try something better: the nook of my arm. But we’re fighting an uphill battle if we don’t get started soon. A fire needs to be built and maintained, wood needs to be brought in to dry, and the driveway and steps need to be dug out. The only other sound following the wind inside is the spinning of various tires outside. It’s the season of knocking neighbors. One ought to be dressed for some community shoveling. You can get to know a neighbor by their tracks — they leave tales of knowhow and knownothing, willpower and horsepower. A steep gravel road covered in an inch of melted and frozen-again ice disguised in several inches of faceted snow is certainly a better test of vehicular command and sheer mettle than the one I took in a musty attic above the only Chinese restaurant in town. 

I open the blinds in the main room to see a neighbor drift around the corner and come to a stand-spinning, his car pointing uphill but unwilling to go up it. 

It’s the first real day of winter here, a late start to a long season. Winter keeps things still for you, preserving the world below so you may take rest above, but oh a fallacy, oh a fantasy she spins tempting to lure you into the comfortable stasis of freezing to death. They say it’s rather cozy at the end.

But not here. You can feel the relief as the town’s anticipation finally comes to a kettle-shaking boil. Winter is not a time of rest and recovery here, but of unending, ever-sending effort. Today is the first day you can grab whatever kind of skis you have and do whatever kind of skiing you do, whether it be classic, nordic, backcountry, resort, uphill, or downhill. You are at your leisure to ski, and you are at your labor to do everything else. Including getting dressed.

I layer before leaving the bedroom: leggings, wool socks, a wool base layer. Then a sweater, fleece overalls, slippers, and a hat. I’m ready to go to the living room. On the nights when I know morning will come with ice in her veins, I put my clothes under the covers with me — something I learned from shoulder-season camping, not from living in a house. In a tent, there is no time. There’s dawn, then birds, then the sun. You move at the pace of an animal, at the pace of coffee and food and however much will there is to cover ground. There is no 8am, there is only the socks you stowed in your sleeping bag and the kindling crackling under a pot. 

In our kitchen, the clock is broken. It’s the only clock in the house. There is no clock on our very small oven. No clock above our industrial stovetop. No clocks on our wrists or our desks. Time only exists in the other realm, online, and that realm only exists to us when we ask it to. In this house of snow and wind, we move at the rhythm of energy: light and heat and food and movement. I don’t have meetings on Saturdays or Sundays. I barely have time at all. Even plans are more like happens when the plan is, “I’ll come knock when I’m ready.” And anyway it’s easy to be ready when the plan is always skis and the outfit is always the one you’re already wearing.

But today the skis hang idly in the shop. Today is a day of taping. Along the window that won’t stay shut by my desk, along the right-side of the patio French doors because you only need one to bring in wood, along the front door we don’t use in the winter because why shovel out three doors when you could just shovel out two?, along the window in our bedroom which we never open because there isn’t a screen and there are three cats, and along the bathroom window upstairs despite how pretty it looks when the snow shimmers in through the cracks. And after the frames are all wrapped in silver, I’ll hang some real garland here and there, flicking on twinkling lights as the temperature in the house breaks 60°. 

As we pile on layers and pile up wood, snow piles up from our boots, and year after year the floor accepts it, absorbing it into the wood and the story of the house before we have a chance to towel her off. The pine remembers it used to drink. The logs accept the warmth of the fire like the sun, and they do their best to give it back at night. Creatures in the walls can be heard busying themselves with their own nests as we busy ourselves with ours. Winter is here, the most impish of the seasons. She comes in fast and wicked, a wily and Wile E. Coyote thinking I’ll get them this time but the clock is broken and the tape is strong and I’ve got all winter long.