In the morning the biting cold as I’m walking in the dark. Some sweet smell of wood fire smoke and the din of far-off traffic. The din is like a distant waterfall in the woods, always there. The thrum of it through the valley walls and foothills many miles away. Soon I will be back in the snow in the mountains clomping my way up a ridge with my ax and snowshoes. I can hardly wait.

Looking down the suburban roads in our neighborhoods every house has their porch lights on. Looking down our street it is completely and utterly dark. Today there is no fog so you can see the stars and that softening by the horizon as the sun curls around. I’ll light a candle now when I’m doing my sun salutations and the flame is a good stand-in for the sun, lapping the walls as it flickers. We could be on the insides of a cave.

Some people still have their Christmas lights up but looking over the landscape most of it has been stripped back to its natural setting. The day’s first cock crows. Some houses you can see still have Christmas lights on inside. It is too deep in the month for me, I am looking ahead to spring. Some houses have motion detector lights and others the soft peach halogen lamps I prefer, that give an almost pink glow and remind me of late-night, urban settings. Though out here it is more trees and critters than car alarms.

I have a fluorescent high visibility vest that lights up green whenever a pair of headlights catches me fiddling in the dark with my phone. Rounding the bend to the horse farms it’s cloaked in fog, the street lamps blurred Jack-the-Ripper style. And up above the big sky over the meadows is that deep, ultra-violet color as the fog obscures the light and it takes on the quality of a 1970s TV screen after the power’s gone off and it still glows for a time. It’s the same effect I marveled over last January at my mom’s house in Germany. You don’t need weed for this.

Some of the cone-shaped Thuja trees beneath the street lamps look like thugs ganged together motionless, waiting to spring. Give them cigarettes and bandannas, tattoos. The telephone poles are leaning and look archaic, from a different time. Land lines. Cables extend from either side, propping them up. We are all on grids overground and under, bound. Shadows from the street signs and oblong shapes in the almost-light of dawn. Lichen on the bare, leafless trees like confetti foam sprayed from a can. Then some coyote or owl screeching, and me too slow to record it. Looking down the long, main road the street lamps at even intervals and the cone of angular light splayed through the fog. I could be in my own creepy comic book pane. Frost on some of the shrubs, their leaves shriveling and more so on the grass and moss, glittering. That small sound of the earth shifting as the frost melts in places, little crackles and pops.

They tried to seal the cracks in the pavement with tar but it just looks like fake Halloween scars. The fog swallows most of the trees close to the ground in the meadows but leaves the tops exposed. They look like wood cuts carved for some handmade diorama. The last of the Christmas lights in the distance, white icicles twinkling through the fog.

I love the look of a long stretch of meadow when the grass is covered in frost. How the day’s first light catches it in a long white smear, then how the sun makes it sparkle. You can see the texture of the ground below and how the earth sweeps off into the distance and ends in more trees. It could be dusted in confectioners sugar or an old dog’s grisly muzzle gone white. Winter has its stark beauty for those who would look for it. You just have to work harder.

In the distance the purple mountains with pockets of fresh snow make me want to be in them. Is it possible to feel a physical love for the mountains? I am already there in my mind, huffing and puffing my way higher.

Dedicating this post to my most loyal reader, my mom, on her birthday. Happy birthday mom, I love you!

Categories: Creative Nonfiction, Memoir

Tags: Creative Nonfiction, journal writing, Memoir, prose