ShareThisIndoors, I toiled and spun my wheels tiredly as a father and husband.
So, in need of a timeout, I went outside to shovel snow and chop up sidewalk ice.
Then, loosened up and sweaty, I zipped up my jacket and cuddled into the sunny, out-of-the wind corner of the front doorway. I was surrounded by snow, which suddenly seemed to soften the edges of the day.
Wrapped in down and wool, I let my brain and muscles power down and my senses do some work.
Overhead a parade of thin, high clouds in animal shapes, such as an aardvark and an alligator, advanced toward the southeast.
As the sun slid into the west, the clouds turned from white to pale yellow to light orange.
A fleeting, thin "V" of a jet contrail appeared between the clouds.
Out of the blue, I remembered that each day was now longer than the last.
The crown of a maple tree filtered the sunlight that reached me. For a while, the only sound was my breathing. When the wind picked up, it rustled the maple's neighbor, a 75-foot-tall white pine.
In this current of air, the evergreen's outer branches began bobbing up and down. The outermost feathery tips of the canopy appeared to flicker like candles.
From behind, I heard the approaching calls of tufted titmice and black-capped chickadees, and then the calls of a white-breasted nuthatch and a red-bellied woodpecker.
Overhead and from the direction of the sun to my right, an American robin made a "tuk" call that seemed to say, "I am here!" The bird flew over the maple, turned left and headed north.
In the front yard, drifting snow pulled down individual stems of goldenrod, like sweatshirt-hood strings tugged by playful kittens.
Beyond the flowers was a stone wall, now packaged in snow.
The wall reminded me of the honeycomb-like shelving unit in our backroom, where the kids kept their toys.
Last month, my wife, Karen, and her first-graders studied snow. One of the books they read was "Under the Snow," by Melissa Stewart.
I wondered what creatures, such as a ladybug, might have tucked themselves in the compartments of that stone wall to ride out the season.
Winter may simplify the scene, but there is still life around us outside. There were 19 plant pots and a woodpile in the garden at the rear of the house. I bet that if I lifted some of the pots or poked through the pile, I would have unearthed a grub or other insects hunkered down to survive the cold.
Moreover, the compost bin, which we keep out of the biting winds, steamed with life when I dug into it before the snowstorm hit.
Of course, I wasn't alone. A quintillion snowflakes surrounded me. Each flake was different and each was the product of a unique path, but now they were all glued together into one landscape.
As the clouds moved to the west, the sky turned blue and seemed to settle around me.
But soon the sun split the horizon. The wind turned icy and seemed to spread around the rock, unearthing the cold spots on my body, starting with the wet sock and shoe that wrapped my right foot.
Sitting for a spell in the snow softened my thinking. The past felt irrelevant, the present praiseworthy and the future much less ominous.
My duty and labor complete for the day, I exulted in the last of its light. Then I left the snow, and headed inside to the warmth of home.
(Scott Turner, a Providence, R.I.-based nature writer, can be reached at scottturnerster(at)gmail.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
Must credit The Providence JournalColumn
