I awoke this morning filled with energy, so I decided to tackle the pile of logs above the driveway. I have fallen behind in accrual of firewood this season, and had begun working on the biggest of these logs Monday morning. I took it slowly (partly because of a little case of tennis elbow that I developed three or four weeks ago), and my little Stihl seemed comfortable in my hand; I paused after every cut to roll the cut log downhill, and to stop and stretch my back and take in the sharp morning air. Paraphrasing Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, I love the smell of chain lube in the morning!
The weather was still mild, but snow had been forecast and the afternoon sky began to look more and more like it might begin soon. Sure enough, during lunch a few flakes began to fall, so I went out and split some of the wood in the midst of the sparse and gentle snow-showers. By 3:00 in the afternoon, as I headed up to Town to go running, it was coming down thick and fast, and when I rounded Mitchell's Curve the road was suddenly white and slick, as if I had turned the page of a book and abruptly changed scene and story. There was nobody in the parking lot at the appointed time, so I started off by myself, picking my way carefully down the increasingly slick-looking streets.
What a great run! The wind was blowing hard out of the north and the west, and the snow was sticking on every single branch and rhododendron leaf along the way, a transformation I never tire of seeing. "This is what runners live for!" I said to myself. Pat passed me in his pickup truck just before the one-mile mark and rolled his window down. "Park and come with me," I said. "It's wonderful!" And it was! But that is sometimes a hard thing to explain to somebody who is passing by in a warm truck which is rocking a little in the strong wind, and I could not prevail upon him to join me. Maybe next time.
By the time I had turned west again and begun to pick my way up Main Street, which was whiter and slicker than I would have expected, the snow had turned to sharp little pellets of ice that began to pepper my face. Another mile? No, I knew it was time to go in.
Bob wrote afterward that he had been out, too, but had missed me.
The wind picked up that evening and I thought about our footprints along Harris Lake filling up with drifting snow. I hope Bob was doing as I was - sitting home drinking something warm and feeling that immense satisfaction of having prevailed in even a little adversity.
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