Hiking today, it started sleeting. It's been a long time since I've heard the sound of sleet in the deep woods: the precise, tiny, musical sound of it striking the brown bed of oak leaves underfoot. It was beautiful in a very December way. I gathered up boughs of hemlock, pine, spruce, rhododendron and running cedar to make my mantles and wreath.
You think of the winter woods as silent, but they are louder now it seems than any other time of year, everything echoing and crunching and magnified. A few fridays ago, I went out and though I've been alone in this national forest literally hundreds of times over the years, I grew suddenly and strangely afraid, hearing rustles and breakings I could not match to sight of a grouse or deer, while the dog wheeled in wide circles around me, responding to my unexpected fear and broadcasting his own. I made myself stay out there another hour just to quit it, going deeper into the hemlocks and lying down on a mossy log until the bizarre wish for flight settled in me, and the sounds felt familiar again. I think it was that the days of the wind we had early in the month knocked all the leaves down for good, and the sound changes when the limbs are truly empty.
I miss my garden. I'm fixing a savory lamb pie for dinner and I was just thinking how nice it would be to have a little chopped kale in it, but the first snow killed everything except my resilient and frost-burned broccoli. I haven't cooked since Wednesday, and I'd missed it. There are few things I find more enjoyable than listening to a record, drinking a little glass of wine, and cooking.
It's my birthday Friday. I hate my dumb birthday. I don't know when that happened, or if it just always was like that. It seems brattish to complain about, especially after I had a very nice weekend. I just wish the week would go easy on me, if I could be wishing for things.
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