WALDEN IN THE DRIFTING SNOW
My woodland journeys were on hiatus over the past month and a half, as my father’s worsening health condition kept us close to the hospital in Bracebridge. Today, on the cusp of the year’s second month, is the first opportunity I’ve had to venture to the edge of The Bog, to admire the fresh snow of the night before. It is truly an uplifting scene, and several passersby I encountered on my short walk, seem equally uplifted, as if the new snow was just the brightness needed to carry on into what has been a dull, bleak and rainy winter thus far.
My father, "Ed" died on the 20th of January, after a short illness which followed-up what we believe was a minor stroke in mid-December. It was a terrible period of uncertainty for him and us, and it also meant we had to move his furnishing to our already cramped abode, as it was apparent early on, that this 85 year old veteran sailor would not be returning to his apartment in Bracebridge. While I have stopped at the end of our lane many times, longing to push out into the woods for a wee respite, there never seemed a moment when the demands of health care, moving, transporting and sleep left any loose moments for dilly-dallying around these leaning old birches and gnarly pines that have always been my escape from daily burdens.
We have now finished most of the shifting of furniture and dishware, pictures and ornaments, boxes and boxes of them, and it has thusly left us a few quiet hours to think about the whirlwind Christmas season that wasn’t very merry at all. As for my father, the confluence of medical conditions beyond the stroke, made recovery quite impossible. He had enjoyed a good and long life, and after living almost two years beyond my mother, who died in 2008, it was obvious in those long hospital conversations, that while he was sorry to leave us, he wasn’t frightened of what fate had in store. Ed wasn’t a particularly spiritual guy and yet he was abundantly aware of his wife’s presence...... just beyond the reality of which he was tethered in this mortal coil. When Ed finally passed that early winter evening, we felt that strange but welcome comfort we humans experience at the end of difficult struggles. I can remember standing out on the walk beside our homestead, just after we had received the call from the hospital, and looking up into the winter sky, and feeling such universality and liberation, as if I was also a heavenward spirit in that angelic nirvana of strong faith and unfettered spirit. It was an unearthly but welcome feeling, a subtle validation at that precise moment, that we are foolish to deny experience ends when the body dies.
This morning the woodlands are heavenly, and beg me to trudge through the snow that has drifted over our region during the night. Even a few steps along this path is enough for the watcher to be enveloped by a most striking solitude, as if you are the only one allowed here at this moment in time......and that there is something important within to observe and understand, as if quite frankly, invited into a sort of heaven on earth. Of course this small bit of hinterland amidst the urban conundrum has always been a touch of heaven for me, a place so restorative of heart and soul that on any day of a typical week, I will retreat here seven or eight times each day just to absorb the ambience of this tiny plot of paradise. My family always knows where to find me.
I have not been able to spend much time writing these past few weeks, and I hope now to be able to return to many of the projects that were suspended from mid-December. I had many good visits with my father, before his final serious decline, and I know he would want me to return to the work and travels I adore. While he seldom referred to, or wanted to discuss my work as a writer, unless there was a newspaper column or editorial of which he particularly approved, or otherwise, I was quite speechless, when going through his papers at home, I found many clippings from publications I wrote for, tucked neatly into books and albums on his bedside bookshelf. I don’t think I could have had any greater inheritance, than to have found that he did have an interest in what his son was penning for all these years. To that point, I confess, it was the one question I had always wanted to pose to my father, but the timing never seemed quite right. I suppose I thought he would have offered a stinging critique of my work, and that frightened me dearly. Writers can be kind of fragile, and seeing as we have usually suffered for our craft, particularly in monetary consideration, I didn’t want our relationship to suffer as well from brute honesty. Yet I’m kind of glad I didn’t ask him because obviously, it would have been insulting, based on the clippings he kept. Maybe he would have been disappointed that I had doubts about his respect for my work. Alas, my deepest fears were put to rest. I thanked him in thought.
The scene across the lane is mesmerizing at times, the wind off the lake is shaking the fresh snow from the evergreen boughs, in huge billowy plumes of spiraling ice crystals. The sound of the wind washing down over the Bog is pleasantly haunting but unceasingly calming to the work-a-day mortal, stopping by the forest on a snowy afternoon.....just for a wee glance. I expect poet Robert Frost, my favorite bard, might have found something interesting and profound to write about in this enchanted woodland now, those leaning old birches remind me of the burdens of a long life. Equally, they remind me of the successes and milestones that are both beautiful, and eternal, as one life generates into another. Soon more snowfall will replace what has been shaken from the long willowy boughs. And these few footfalls toward the interior, will be filled in once more, yet I know the nuances of this old forest in my heart, after so many miles and hours spent packing down the trail.....in contemplation of a good life. I will never forget my way, in life or the hereafter of which, in this gentle place, I have found a portal divine, from which a final chapter has been inspired.....but alas, it reads as a beginning just as life cycles eternal, as the seasons caress this landscape......soon to show the emerging heads of spring wildflowers pushing up through the frost.
Godspeed old friend.