I spent a while tonight shoveling snow, a ritual to which I have grown quite accustomed this winter. I made the arrogant mistake of pointing out to my wife one day last week, after a particularly satisfying session of excavating, that I enjoyed seeing all of our walks, and the backyard deck, and our driveway, clear of the snow cone-like mess that was left by a quick but sloppy storm.
It was a comfort to me to look out of my windows to see neatly shoveled paths to our bird feeder, to the barn and to my truck, which has to endure the harsh winter weather since only our car can fit into a garage made snug by the Fred Sanford-like clutter of recycling cans and filing cabinets and overflowing shelves.
But I have paid the price of such chutzpah; another cold front has curled its frigid fingers around the Midwest, and just last night we picked up nearly half-a-foot of powdery snow that this evening covers every track and trail and clear road that my plastic shovel and I had created on willpower and ibuprofen and a well-guarded back. Now, a new load of snow blankets the tops of fence posts, hangs precariously from the eaves of our barn and sits on the rocking chairs and old wooden storage trunk that reside on our porch, mocking the roof that they supposedly use for protection.
We have grown quite tired of the monotonously similar weather forecasts we hear: “Mostly cloudy,” the weathermen tell us day after day, “with a chance of snow.” In the not-so-long-ago old days, the two of us, both teachers in small, rural schools, delighted in those words, for we might enjoy a day off from work, a day we not only didn’t have to pay back, but also one in which we could sleep in a little.
But times have changed. We must now tone for our snow days under the illusion that we can keep our students’ attention in warmer, greener times, and I stew a little now in knowing that despite their both being adults, my two kids are driving in, rather than playing in, the stuff. It’s on days such as these decades ago that I used to be on my sled, racing down my cousins’ hill across the road from our house. I’d go inside only for a change of socks or gloves or scarf.
Yet, despite the labor it causes me now, I have grown friendly with our frequent snowfalls. I often shovel in the evenings under a crystalline sky, in the dying light that Rockwell Kent or Maxfield Parrish captured in watercolors. I watch my breath in regular smoky puffs and feel my face turn pleasantly numb, and despite an obvious lack of publicity on such matters, feel myself accomplishing something — a self-satisfying clearing and cleansing — one scoop of my shovel at a time.
I can now anticipate the places on my deck where the treated brown boards have raised up a little, a frozen swelling for which I have to adjust the angle of my shovel lest I punch myself in the stomach with its rigid handle. I have the odd shape of our deck planned out in my head, too, knowing that I can save a few trips down and back by cutting a corner here and there. It is near my back door that the snow nearly always blows off our roof to pile itself up in a most inconvenient spot, so my first shoveling task is always near there, for our cats’ bowls manifest a snow-removal priority, something like snow routes plowed first by the road crews.
In recent weeks, the snow has come in three varieties. There has been a powder that easily picks itself up and moves across our fields and closes our roads and reminds us all of Napoleon’s miserable army in retreat across Russia. There, too, is the snow we still can see crusted on the north sides of the trees like sprayed insulation on an industrial building’s ceiling. It was that snow a few weeks back that led me to check to be certain that my mailbox would open for a mailman already weary from a long morning of tugging and pulling.
There is also the wet, heavy snow, the self-packing kind that makes my shoveling real work. It is the kind that I know causes sore backs and coronaries in middle-aged men. I obviously try to avoid both maladies, so I set a fairly leisurely pace and rest often. My friend, Joe, tells me that I need an electric snow broom or gas-powered blower to clear away the mess, but for now, I still like the sound of my scraping shovel and crunching boots, and I do need the exercise this time of year.
In recent days, we have experienced a freezing fog that leaves our pine trees and woven wire and uncut ornamental grasses glazed like works of art. My woods remind me of a Dr. Zhivago-like wonderland, and despite knowing that it all melts away in a process that resembles a false snowfall, it is a beautiful thing to see, a natural freezer in need of a natural defrosting. I told my students in an early morning class a few days back that it was a real joy to be up early to see the sun cut a path into that splendid frosty air, and they looked at me as if I had volunteered to diffuse bombs or had claimed to have spotted a Yeti behind the house.
In her beautifully rendered, “February Twilight,” poet Sara Teasdale recounts a silent icicle of an evening when she “stood beside a hill/Smooth with new-laid snow. A single star looked out/From the cold evening glow.” I have been in a similar place quite frequently this winter. I enjoy my shoveling for the most part, but like her, it is the evening sky that keeps my attention most of all.
It is getting dark on me now, and I am tempted to grab that shovel and head out to the south side of our house to tackle a few inches of snow just left for us yesterday.
“Why don’t you wait,” my wife half-asks and half-tells me. “The weatherman says it’s going to stay cloudy, and there’s a good chance for snow.”
I have no doubt about that.
Mike Lunsford can be reached at hickory913@aol.com, or by regular mail C/O the Tribune-Star, P.O. Box 149, Terre Haute, IN 47808. He will be speaking and signing his books at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at Indiana State on Thursday; the Clay County Historical Society on March 1; Psi Iota Xi meeting at the Vigo County Library on March 2; and at BookNation on March 5. Check for times and other presentations on Mike’s Web page at www.mikelunsford.com.
Mike Lunsford
The Off Season: The mostly cloudy with a chance of snow times have changed
- Mike Lunsford
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
I got a letter last week from a friend, Sister Margaret Quinlan, who lives amidst the beauty of the St. Mary-of-the-Woods campus. Besides the email space and the time she invests in describing the flowers and trees and birds that she shares with her roomies out there, as well as her accounts of teaching and traveling, Margaret most often writes about books. She loves them, and she knows I do, too.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Hoping to master the art of taking a nap
I got away from work as early as I could one day last week. It was a cloudy day, filled with grayness and rain, and my head felt as if I had inhaled my pillow the night before. My throat suggested I’d swallowed a wood rasp, too, and my eyes felt as though I was looking through someone else’s glasses. Yet, I had work do, this column being on the list of chores.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Windy companion finally gives him the cold shoulder
The wind came to visit us this week. We live on the knob of a hill that overlooks a Raccoon Creek valley, and it is a breezy spot year-round, but this wind was the kind that ushers in a full-blown front from Canada, perhaps just to remind us that cold weather is going to be the boss around here for a while. No matter how surprising our mild winter has been so far, this kind of wind tells us not to expect many more warm days over the next few months.
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SIDELINES: Good for even a traditional Classic buff
Lights down, tree out, another year gone at the Classic.
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THE OFF SEASON: The more things change, the more they keep changing
I must have had at least a dozen people ask at my son’s wedding a few weeks ago whether I cried, or “how I was handling losing him.” I think they all knew just how tight I am with my two kids, and thought I must have come completely unglued when it finally hit me that he was on his own for good, that the rules had changed nearly as much in my life when he said ,“I do,” as they did for him.
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Lunsford signing new book at Brazil Coffee Grounds
Parke County writer Mike Lunsford will be signing his latest book, “A Place Near Home” (Shade Tree Press; $15) from 10:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday at Coffee Grounds, Bakery and Coffee Shop in Brazil.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: In the neighborhood with the ‘fantastic’ Mr. Fox
As we drove home late one night last week, my wife and I, both a bit drowsy and anxious for a warm bed and a long nap, were surprised to see a red fox as it darted across the road. He made his appearance in a flash — just a bit of nose and fur and bushy tail — as he jumped out of a ditch in front of our car and was caught in the glare of our headlights on his way to the relative safety of an apple orchard.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The lizard wore long johns, and other Halloween tales
We stocked our house with a supply of Halloween candy last week; Joanie and I stopped into the new dollar store in town and filled a grocery cart with Butterfingers and Baby Ruths and Three Musketeers bars. Every aromatic bit of it has been calling to me from the orange-and-black baskets we keep on a living room trunk ever since.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Here’s to the simple beauty of an untended garden…
I can hear a combine eating its way across a nearby cornfield as I write this on a Saturday evening. It is a sound that signals the end of one season and the beginning of anot
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The Off Season: Listening to Mozart is a ‘purr-fect’ way to relax
Regardless of what some people may believe, classical music fans are not snobs. They come from all walks of life, fall into all income brackets, and they’re not required to understand or analyze anything to which they’re listening; they just need to enjoy themselves.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Fall’s arrival heralded in ever-present fencerows
As much as I hate summer to leave us, I am happy that fall is just around the corner. It has been a bone-dry season, one in which I’ve watched my yard bake and crack like an old pie crust. My wife and I are still spending our evenings going about the business of watering flowers, standing with a dribbling hose in our hands, optimistically hoping that our drought will be broken because we’ve tempted the weather fates to do us one better and give us a good rain.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: The value of hard work goes well beyond a paycheck
Years ago, I used to drive into Rosedale to get my workday started with a big cup of black coffee. Every morning, Monday through Friday, until the town grocery store’s business dried up and blew away, you could have found me slipping through a back door — left unlocked for the early birds — of the old Red and White, 15 minutes before it opened for official business.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Life’s little conveniences actually can be quite annoying
I am aware that much of the language I use is outdated, stodgy, old-fashioned; I apologize.
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The Off Season: Another sad passing: One-time trendsetter can’t keep up
I wandered into the local mall bookstore the other day. My wife and I had come to town with a list of chores to do and things to buy, but whenever we venture anywhere near a place with book shelves and sales tables and racks of paperbacks, we’re attracted to the scent of ink and the sight of book covers like bees to clover .
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Overheated in Hobart and other vacation tales…
My family climbed into our van and headed to Michigan a few weeks ago, just as we do every other year or so, to stay on the great lake there, for we have come to love its cool breezes and blue water and lighthouses.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Silence is wonderful, as long as you don’t take it too far
I have visited this topic — how it is often only through inconvenience that we come to appreciate the comforts we have in life — before.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: His tolerance for insects ends with sawyer beetles
As I sloshed a can of water over a pot of red petunias a Sunday morning ago, I saw a pine sawyer beetle make its way slowly up the vinyl siding near my front door. I swatted it to the concrete, and smashed it with my shoe … with impunity, I might add.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Storm damage makes you appreciate home
My wife and I hadn’t been into town for a good while when we drove in from our place to visit her doctor and my favorite hardware store last week.
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Paying respect in more way than one way…
It has become a habit of mine on Mother’s Day to go to Rosedale Cemetery and lay a few irises on my mom’s grave.
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The Off Season: On the trail with Max the Mushroom Cat
The wet weather and a busy calendar have kept my wife and me from doing what we’ve really wanted to do for a while. Ever since the thermometer began to stay consistently above 40 and the grass started to green, we’ve wanted to get outside, get some sun on our arms, and get down to the wetlands to watch the geese make their landings with a flourish and a honk.
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THE OFF SEASON: So much to do; so little time…
My wife’s aunt, Martha Jean McCarthy, passed away earlier this month; she was 85 years old. Martha Jean was kind and generous and busy her entire life.
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MIKE LUNSFORD: A lesson plan for public schools
I am an advocate of public education; I pull no punches about that. I have taught in public schools for 32 years, and I think it is an inherently American institution.
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THE OFF SEASON: Craning to see elegance in flight
Just before midnight last night, spring officially slipped quietly into our back yards, but I doubt that any of us noticed it much this morning as we slurped our coffee or downed our eggs over this newspaper.
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The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped. Already, I have the overflow stacked on the floor and shoved into the spaces where previous tenants once lived. Gradually, expediency is replacing order, so fiction and non-fiction, biographies and novels, are scandalously co-mingling on my shelves.
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THE OFF SEASON: The office boy who became a poet
I made up my mind when I moved my home office out of the house last summer that I’d organize some of my books, that I’d categorize and catalogue them in a way that would help me find the one I wanted when I wanted it. I can’t say it worked out as well as I had hoped.
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THE OFF SEASON: It’s taken long time to say thanks…
It was with a cup of coffee and a newspaper in my hands a few Mondays ago that I discovered that Mr. Hapenny had died.
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THE OFF SEASON: Lessons learned from the night the ice fell
The picture window of my cabin is sealed in a perfect glaze of ice as I write this, last Thursday morning, and since it faces due north and sees little direct sunlight, I imagine I will be looking through this shower door glass of mine for a few more days. But since I sit and watch the woods much of the time, instead of writing, I suppose the ice is serving a rare good purpose in keeping me on task.
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The Off Season: Pass a ‘midnight dreary’ with The Big Read
It was a pretty poor excuse for an evening one night last week as I lay beside our glowing fireplace, a pillow propped behind my head. I was spending some time with my current read, enjoying each page in the semi-darkness, smug in the knowledge that I’d not be heading to my classroom the next day.
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The Off Season: ‘Too old and too lazy’ to deal with coyotes
Despite the cold and the ever-present winter breezes that blow across our hill these days, I often find myself, even in the blue evenings, standing on the walk near my cabin, looking at the stars or watching for the last red-tailed hawks of the day as they float by in the drafts.
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The Off Season: The passion of having a passion is a great thing
It just occurred to me that I am fortunate to have a passion — a drive to do something that takes me away from the clutches of my job, of home repairs, of the mundane and the ho-hum.
- More Mike Lunsford Headlines
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MIKE LUNSFORD: Books open our eyes to that which we will never see
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Whitney Houston Funeral to Be Invitation Only
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Bacteria Keep Swimmers Off Some Fla. Beaches
New Details in Search for Missing Utah Mom
Trial Opens for Ala. Man in Bride's Diving Death
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Baltimore's 'Crime Stopper' Is a Basketball Star
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Arm Wrestler Not Guilty Plea in Wife's Death
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First Person: Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show
Raw Video: Whitney Houston's Last Performance
Obama: Good US-China Ties Help the Whole World
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And the Winner for Best Super Bowl Ad Is...
Obama's New Budget: The Winners and Losers
School Pays Students to Attend Class
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Ultimate Tazer Ball is a Shocking New Sport
Shakira Attacked By Sea Lion
Modern day treasure hunter searching for $3 billion prize
What Happened Inside Whitney's Hotel Room?
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VS Models Wow for V-Day
Olympic Swimmer Proposes on Podium After Big Win
Kate Upton MLB 2K12 Commercial
Watch: Whitney Houston's Golden Hearse
Scarlett Johansson's Bikini P-D-A
Man Allegedly Drowns Wife While Scuba Diving
Glee Pays Tribute to Whitney
Wash. becomes 7th state to okay same-sex marriage
Romijn's 60 Pound Weight Loss
The 'Celebrity Apprentice' Cast Meets Donald Trump
Kissing contest heats up
Hugh Hefner's Son Arrested
Jacqueline Kennedy's personal papers released
Did Tyler Perry Have a Secret Wedding?
