The Edge of Winter

 

When the snow comes

The first day the snow comes, the first night, the first day the roads close, is always special. Mid-week, it brings those “will I get out in the morning? When do I phone and say I can’t make it” questions. This year, the snow came on a Friday night and Saturday became a comfortable “O, well, not to worry” day. All plans dissolved. The Farmer’s Market in Bakewell. A big food shop. A drive out to walk on a hill. In busier days, weekend snow would still have woken anxiety – move the car at the first opportunity, be ready to get out for next week’s storying. But while my business is still here, the busy-ness isn’t: rebuilding is slow, so the snow comes without worries for once and offers a chance to simply pause and appreciate.

 

This first day of snow becomes a morning for small jobs, frittering things that can be interrupted in a moment by the call of the world beyond the window. It’s that transformation that enchants. A world gone monochrome. And the muffled silence the snow brings. And the emptied streets with an occasional car creeping along. A 4WD goes past boldly, too boldly, and slides round a corner. But pedestrians can stride along the road where those few car tracks make for easier progress.

 

I can’t resist that call. I have to stop and simply stand and watch. Watch nothing really. The tall larch letting the snow slide off its branches. The black snowflakes of jackdaws blowing across the sky. Next door’s garden, its edges blanketed smooth. I keep an eye on Corbar Edge rising beyond the town. Cloud gathers above the hills in a backdrop and I know that if the grey spills over, a wave breaking through the trees, swallowing that horizon, there will be more snow on the way.

 

Tidying the library. Rearranging books in their piles. Trying to trim and failing. How do I compare a 1940s guide to “Wayside and Woodland Trees” with a book about unicorns and Bob Trubshaw’s Sacred Landscapes? I don’t, of course, I just shuffle them and leave them to watch the cold gather.

 

I don’t resist for that long. The day isn’t that long. And by mid-afternoon the temperature is dropping again, the slush growing crusts, the air clearing, brittle. It is windy and the trees on the hill sway like kelp. The wind has combed them vigorously. Twigs and branches litter the ground. Deep in the woods, there have been bigger casualties. Beeches uprooted. I feel vulnerable here, watching a new fall. Just a branch but its fall is silent. No warning. There have been other people here: footprints everywhere. The parallel scores of a small sled. A single tread. Someone rode a bike through this?

 

Now, as the afternoon fades, I have the woods to myself. The woodland edge, where it opens onto a hillside field is a sledging run with attendant shouts, screams, laughter, over-excited dogs and tumbling people. But for now, the enchantment of the woods under snow is mine and I can walk into a silence that echoes through the woods and fills me with the edge of winter.