The sun was bright this morning, slipping through the bare branches, and splashing a glowing golden spot on my bedroom wall. The wind tossed the trees and sent dry leaves skittering across the snow. Chickadees and titmice flitted from branch to branch in the bent maple outside my window. The sky was a clear gold near the hilltop over which the sun was just climbing, then changed to a sweet, pale blue overhead, with small tatters of cloud, tinted buff and gold, racing eastward.
It was very warm for a January morning; 44 degrees, and water drizzling from the eaves. Up on the hill, the snow was all gone from a warm slope underneath the shelter of pine trees. It didn't look like January.
That was about two hours ago, before I am setting down these words. Now the wind has increased, and gusts cry and howl around the exposed beam-ends at the front of the house. A dark gray mass of clouds rolled in from the northwest, and now the sky is entirely overcast, the hills around the village fading in the snow that now pelts at the windows. The temperature is dropping, and now stands at 40 degrees. It's not going to get warmer for a while; by midweek, the thermometer will struggle to reach the low single digits for a high, and at night it will fall well below zero.
It's Inauguration Day; the President and VP take their oaths in quiet, private ceremonies, and tomorrow there will be the big wing-ding, with speeches and poems and anthems and hymns and the big overlong parade, and then banquets and balls far into the night. I'm just as glad to watch from here.
When I was in high school there was one January 20th that fell on a Wednesday - I remember, because it was Winter Activities Day, when the afternoons were given over to things like skiing, skating, and other things to give us a break from the monotony of school during the long bleak winter. For a couple of years, I signed up for cross-country skiing, and a dozen or so kids and teachers would go out to the Cutts farm on the Grafton Road and go skiing in the woods there.
This one particular January 20th was still and gray, the sky overcast but not snowing. It wasn't especially cold - somewhere in the low 20s, I suppose. I remember being on top of a big sidehill meadow, with the barn and sugarhouse down below, and the house behind some trees, with smoke curling from the chimney. It was quiet; I don't know where my fellow skiers were, but I remember being alone up there, looking down at the farm buildings, and at the dark stripe of the road, and the gray wooded mountains that rose up all around me. It was so peaceful - the cool, even light that seemed to cast no shadows, the dormant woods, the little column of sweet woodsmoke that rose from the chimney, suggesting warmth and food.
Sometimes, when I have too much going on in my head, I will think of that peaceful moment, when I was alone but far from lonely, in the quiet of the serene, snowy land.
It's snowing quite hard now, and the wind drives the snow horizontally through the air. The temperature has dropped another 2 degrees since I started writing this.
I have to go get ready for work. I hope to retain the peaceful memory of that long-ago January 20th with me as I move through the clamor of my day.
