Getting Purchase on the Moment

'Tis the season here along the upper stretches of The Big River when something in the earth's clutch slips and our beloved blue orb yaws a little off kilter and it's easy to see it's going to take some considerable time to readjust itself. This geo-mechanical contretemps, in turn, has decidedly-marked celestial consequences.

The sun's boiler is temporarily cooled and it can barely build up enough steam to navigate itself upstream. As the pressure diminishes, the ball of fire that had us on a steady bake just a couple months ago becomes so sluggish that it takes it until almost eight o'clock in the morning to achieve the summit of the bluffs to the east. After that it never does get very far up in the air and is sure to be pretty well spent before suppertime, even if you eat early. If all that isn't pitiable enough, the whole chore of just getting up and around rarely leaves Old Sol with enough spunk to punch through the cloud cover.

The upshot of this whole affair is that we don't get much light, one of the key ingredients of life. And in the absence of light just about every living thing that hasn't crept in through the cracks, flown south, or gone to sleep has surrendered its color and settled for a gray or brown as drab as the sparrows puffed with cold and huddled in the leafless bittersweet. Even the cedars and spruce that we call evergreen can't summon up enough luminescence to exceed the complexion of their own shadows.

This is the time of year when it takes a long time to get dressed to go outside. And the longer it takes to get dressed, the longer it takes to get undressed. So once you go outside it makes sense to do everything you want or need to do before you come back inside. Having established above that there isn't that much time to begin with, this is a season that demands considerably more efficiency.

So now when I come home from work I don't come inside right away. I am more likely to make a stop at the garage just long enough to pull on my quilted bib overalls and head to the poor man's woodshed, a snow-covered tarpaulin tent. On all fours I crawl underneath and, contorting myself, I toss split elm and oak logs into a wheelbarrow with which I will lumber across the yard to the basement door. From there, armloads are muscled up the stairs and into a 4' X 4' rick on the deck. (This is the last stop before said fuel makes its way indoors and onto a smaller rick where it will, within 24 hours, heat me for the umpteenth and final time.) Whenever an armload is dropped a brief rest has been earned.

It feels good to sweat in single-digit temperatures.

It was during one of those short breathers, with less than an hour of daylight remaining, when the sun mustered up some gumption and made its play. An orange-yellow beam reflected across the smooth ice for the full width of the river, perhaps a mile across from my vantage point. It broke into a rippling dance in the small strip of open water that still forms a narrow channel between shores of ice mottled with splotches of snow constantly being rearranged by a steady, bitter wind.

A cardinal landed three feet away from me in the filigreed remains of the bittersweet, eyeing the surviving berries as flaming red as he. As the sun lowered, the yellow beam on the ice climbed up the Minnesota bluffs and painted the bottom edge of the sky with orange, icy fire. An eagle stood at the edge of the open water, staring intently into the mystery below.

Some winter moments are momentous.