Coping with cabin fever

 

Looking out the window, I gaze at a world of white. Snow clings to every branch and leaf in the back yard. I lean against the glass and shiver from the cold seeping in.

A cardinal pecks at the birdfeeder, a bright red spot in the snow. His mate joins him; the orange beak her only adornment against muted brown feathers. 

"Living in the country in winter is not easy," said nature writer Gladys Taber from the perch of her seventeenth-century farmhouse in Connecticut. "It is not simply sitting by a log fire and reading that good book. It is no life for lazy people. One morning always comes when you are snowed in, no matter whether you planned to go out or not. You can't even open the front door."

Past winters have been warmer, which was attributed to global warming; but this year has been cold, windy, snowy and stormy. As lovely as fresh fallen snow can be, confinement sets in as day after day dawns dark and dismal.

"Most of us, I thought, are caged in some way all our lives," said Taber. "There are walls and bars and fences of all kinds, invisible but tangible. We spend a great deal of time climbing over obstacles --perhaps this is what life is all about. But we must all, I think, long for a brief time of real freedom outside the restrictions of our existence."

Hidden beneath hundred-foot pines, our barn is camouflaged in the snow. The Amish hex sign at the peak draws the eye to the heavens. The well-worn path is obscured. Cabin fever sets in.

"The ancient house speaks to us," Taber said. "Footfalls sound on  the steep stairs, doors open softly, floorboards creak, echoing lives lived here long, long ago. And I think echoes of the lives of our family will be here too."

‘Till even the comforting barn grows far away’

A view of our barn from the house during Friday's storm.

Surveying the damage from yet another nor’easter, I think we were pretty lucky.

A tree near the dog kennel snapped from the burden of snow and tug of wind.

The accordion truck bed cover on the Dodge Ram collapsed from the massive weight of water, snow and ice.

Looking around the yard, there are so many broken limbs that we’ll have to wait until the snow melts to unearth them. Two logs still cling to the snow-covered roof from the last storm.

Yet overall, we view this latest onslaught by Mother Nature as just another chapter of this highly unpredictable winter.

Shoveling the brick front stairs and path to the driveway, I have plenty of time to think about the extra work and hardship the recent bouts of wild weather have caused: days without power, a dwindling wood pile, empty cupboards, traffic accidents, coastal flooding, downed trees, delays and loss of wages.

But as I see the artistry around me, the puffy white cotton clinging to tree branches, dusting evergreens and creating fields of virgin snow, I am spellbound by its beauty.

The sky is blue, the air crisp and clean. Everything sparkles wearing its fresh new coat of snow.

A few years ago I spent some time at The Frost Place, Poet Robert Frost’s 1915 farm homestead in Franconia, New Hampshire.

Tucked in the White Mountains, the house offered a spectacular view; but as I gazed from his covered porch in October, I pictured what it looked like in winter.

Off the beaten path or in the words of the poet, somewhere along “the road not taken,” this place must have been cut off from civilization in wintertime.

Many of his poems are set in this remote backdrop, including “Dust of Snow,” “Fire and Ice,” “Looking for a Sunset Bird in Winter,” “The Mountain,” “An Old Man’s Winter Night,” “Snow,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “A Winter Eden” and “The Wood-Pile.”

But Frost, who was aptly named, also felt the dread of a nor’easter. He captured these feelings in “Storm Fear”:

“How drifts are piled, / Dooryard and road ungraded, / Till even the comforting barn grows far away, / And my heart owns a doubt / Whether ‘tis in us to arise with day / And save ourselves unaided.”