by jphilo | Jan 25, 2010 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
I didn’t expect last Tuesday to be my swan song. I bundled up and put on my Yak Tracks before venturing outside for another foggy, morning walk. Our little gravel road was spectacularly beautify. The hoarfrost, the thickest I’ve ever seen it, coated every branch, every blade of grass long enough to reach through the snow, every fence line. My walk took a long time, because I paused often to photograph the once-in-a-lifetime scenery.
Now I’m glad I did because walking outdoors has been impossible ever since. On Wednesday, an ice storm hit. A half inch of ice replaced the hoarfrost and turned the great outdoors into a skating rink for three days. Our gravel road is still treacherous, though the paved roads and sidewalks improved over the weekend. But last night the wind picked up, an unexpected four inches of snow fell, drifts are blocking the driveway and road, and visibility is terrible.
This may sound like old-timer talk, but this winter reminds me of the ground breaking winter of 1967-68. We had so many snow days in northwest Iowa, the state finally said we didn’t have to make them up. The snow was so deep the school board finally rescinded the dress code which prohibited female teachers and student from wearing slacks to schools, though we still couldn’t wear jeans. And they also quit requiring teachers to go to report to school when it was called off for students. I am not making this up!
It also brings to mind The Long Winter, one of the books in the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. This book recounts a terrible winter in the late 1800s, shortly after the completion of the railroad into De Smet, South Dakota. The winter was so bad, the trains couldn’t get through for months and the townspeople nearly starved to death.
When I read the series aloud to the kids when they were little (which we did more than once), Hiram refused to listen to The Long Winter. “It’s too depressing,” he objected. “Please, skip over it and go onto the next one.” Back then I objected to his censorship, but now that we’re living Long Winter: The Sequel in real time, his suggestion is worthy of resurrection.
What do you think? Should we skip over this season and move on to the next one in the series? I’m game. If you’re with me on this one, leave a comment about when we should fast forward to spring.
by jphilo | Jan 14, 2010 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
Where I live, finding hope in January is like searching for a needle in a snowbank. It’s too darn cold to try and a whole lot easier to find it once the snow melts.
So I was delighted when hope popped through the snow piles and cold weather during one of my morning walks this week. The sight of a perfectly round miniature mace poking out of a snowdrift near the garage stymied me at first.
The mice who squat in our garage immediately came to mind, along with memories of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nihm. Surely, the little critters don’t haven’t the skill to construct a dark ages weapons factory, do they? Certainly, there aren’t enough of them to launch a full scale attack on my car, are there?
Upon closer inspection, my heart rate slowed. The miniature mace wasn’t a mace at all. It was some sort of seed pod, a cocklebur maybe. No, it was too big for a cocklebur. But it was a seed pod. What grew in front of that bit of fence last summer? Purple coneflowers? Yes, the mouse mace was a purple coneflower seed head.
Somehow, it had survived the weight of a three foot snow drift. Somehow, it not only survived, but also muscled its way to the surface. And the sight of it on a cold January morning brought hope, pure hope.
If the cone flower could conquer snow and wind and cold, maybe I can survive the dark doldrums of January. Maybe I’ll find patience to wait for February to pass by and for March to begin the melting. Maybe April will find me on my knees beside the cone flower, and we’ll breathe in spring together.
Hope in January – like finding a seed pod in a snow bank.
by jphilo | Jan 5, 2010 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
The Midwest is in the midst of the shiveriest cold spell we’ve seen in good long while. Our lows have been below zero every night for a week, with highs in the single digits during the heat of the day, and the pattern is supposed to continue through the weekend.
In weather is this frigid, I usually walk indoors. But when cabin fever sets in, I bundle up and brave the cold. During yesterday’s frigid outing, I tried to think of as many positive things about walking below zero as possible. Here’s what I came up with before my toes went numb:
- The the snow isn’t slippery when it’s around zero, so there’s less chance of falling.
- The cold kills germs so the flu season should be shorter.
- There’s less traffic on the road since the sensible people don’t drive when it’s like this.
- Snowfall chances diminish as the temperature plummets.
- Observing the world through frosty eyelashes creates an unusual effect.
- The purchase of a down-filled coat feels like money well spent.
- Extra clothing weight burns more calories.
- Empathy for Canadians grows and could conceivably lead to better trade relations with our neighbors to the north.
- Jack London novels make sense.
- The population of bunnies, ground squirrels, mice, and other troublesome varmints must be taking a hit.
Can you believe I came up with ten positives so quickly? If you have more to add to the list, leave a comment so our gratitude for this cold snap is as great as it should be.
Hey, I already thought of one more: when we finally get back to double digit highs, spring will be much, much closer.
Now that’s a happy thought!
by jphilo | Dec 8, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
Even though snow is never my weather-of-choice, except on Christmas Eve when a maximum of 2 inches of snow can settle upon the landscape to create a picturesque scene for 24 hours only, the dusting of white stuff that greeted me Monday morning, put me in a philosophical mood.
I had just wrestled a new pair of gorilla treads onto my tennis shoes, and the tracks they created made me think of all the places I’ve been in the past year. One year ago, I was walking on a motel treadmill in West Virginia before delivering my son to the PTSD outpatient clinic. This week, Allen is in Wisconsin speaking at an organic farming conference. What a great distance he’s traveled, what a great distance our entire family has traveled, in the last 365 days. What a great God has guided us into this future we never expected.
I passed our garage, marveling at God’s faithful and unexpected work in our family, and a hole in the edge of the path I’d shoveled caught my eye. There was another hole about 3 feet beyond it, and another and another, all three feet apart, connected by what looked like a miniature mole tunnel, until the tunnel reached the corner of our garage.
I’d heard about mouse tunnels in the snow, but this was the first one I’d seen. I imagined the mouse busily excavating, then poking his head out for a breath of air, a progress check and a course correction. Then, down again to bravely plow through the darkness, until he found shelter from the storm.
This picture doesn’t do Mickey and Minnie’s tunnel justice and the thought of mice camping in my garage sets my teeth on edge. But for a few moments, I identified with the mouse. After years of dark tunnels with small comfort and few answers, after infrequent breaths of hope, little progress, and a multitude of course corrections, we have found sweet shelter and joy in God’s amazing healing and strength.
Call me a softie, but tonight there’s room for Mickey and Minnie in our garage…but if they get in the car again, they’re dead meat
by jphilo | Nov 23, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
November is not Iowa’s best month.
Maybe that’s why our small state has never been a destination location in late fall, except for the fourth Thursday of the month when people come back in droves for an indoor frenzy of food and football. Considering Iowa’s landscape this time of year, who can blame our inhabitants and visitors for eating themselves into a stupor and yelling at a bunch of goofy guys in helmets running around on TV?
True, the temperatures have been mild for November and the winds calm. But the cloudy gray skies, the bare, gray tree limbs, and the feeble, ineffective hours of daylight make for poor eye candy during my daily walks. In fact the scenery is so glum, it takes all the discipline I can muster and an Evelyn Lundberg Counseling Agency pep talk to force me out the door.
This past Saturday was no exception. In addition to the normal gloom, a thick fog settled over our area. No need to become road kill this close to the holidays, I thought, and delayed my walk until mid-morning. Even then, the mist hadn’t completely dissipated. Everything around me was gray and shades of gray, at ten in the morning no less.
And then I walked behind our community college. The campus was quiet and empty for the weekend, except for a row of wet and shivering crab apple trees between the parking lot and the buildings. The naked branches were loaded with fruit, crying as the blanket of fog lifted and left them exposed and red and lovely.
What other beauty is hidden in the fog, beauty I miss by concentrating on dreariness and gloom? What bright colors have I missed, driven indoors by gray skies and weak sun?
Instead of waiting for the fog to lift, perhaps I should walk into it and find joy in unexpected places, in every season of the year.
by jphilo | Nov 11, 2009 | Walking Down the Gravel Road
For the past few weeks, I’ve made conscious attempts to strike a new path. To get more exercise and simultaneously expand my horizons, I’ve altered my walking route to include a jaunt along a lovely path in our city’s largest park.
But my lily-livered legs barely adjusted to the additional distance before disaster struck. City workers with a honking big bulldozer and a jumbo-sized dump truck started tearing out the walking path. Within two days, the little asphalt path was reduced to a dirt trail.
So now I’m smack dab in the middle of a new routine and have to adjust to another change. Just how flexible does a fifty-three-year-old woman have to be, I want to know? While we’re on the subject, here are a few other unwelcome changes in my life.
- Mary Kay discontinued my favorite colors of blush, eye shadow, and lip gloss. Not that I use that many cosmetics, since I was an adolescent during the granola crunchy era and spurned make up until my late forties. But when I finally got comfortable with the one-eighty switcheroo, the company up and changed things.
- If what I heard in a recent radio report is true, they’ve changed the Sesame Street theme song which worked perfectly well for forty years. And if Captain Kangaroo is off the air, I don’t want to know that one either.
I’m not sure how much more change I can handle. If I have to become any more flexible, I’m going to need yoga lessons. And if I take yoga, I know I’ll get stuck in the lotus position and spend the rest of my life as a poor imitation of a pretzel. That is simply unacceptable since I’m trying to watch my salt intake.
But if they replace the old walking path with a new one, I promise to leave my comfort zone and try it out, my face scrubbed clean of cosmetics, my iPod blasting the old Sesame Street theme song while I walk. That’s as flexible as I can be, barring the lotus position.
In the meantime, pass the pretzels.
