The Book on Winter

Winter is in the books.

I don’t know all the totals and stats that describe the snow and ice and cold that abused and amused us this year. I didn’t keep a snowfall log and breathlessly announce new precipitation depths to our guests each morning. I didn’t even track my ski days, of which there were dozens, if not scores.

My books are filled not with statistics, but stories. Like the story of the front porch. One Saturday night after dinner in early February, I was out in the dark shoveling. It had been snowing hard all day, and for the first time this winter the snow was heavy and wet. The shoveling was brutal, and I was forced to take smaller bites of the mushrooming piles at my feet, for fear that my back, heart, or lungs would give out.

Saturday night snowfalls are the second best night for snow. Sunday nights are the best, because there’s no one around: everyone clears out of a ski town on Sundays in the winter, so the snowfall is uninterrupted by any traffic. Saturday nights are a close second, and that’s what I was thinking last February as I shoveled. Then I heard the sounds.

Because it was so quiet, and because it was snowing so hard--two or three inches an hour--I was contained inside my own little cone of silence. To say that sounds were muffled wasn’t exactly accurate; they were detached, as if they were traveling in their own cones, small storm systems of sound in the atmosphere. The occasional car would pass by and I would see it, but its sound would only extend out for a few feet around it, like bands of rain from a hurricane.

But the packet of sound that made me stop shoveling was different. It sounded like a sigh, the relaxing of a cork from a bottle of Champagne. I stood up straight, my back screaming, my bad shoulder aching, my good shoulder considering the same, sweat trickling down my neck and chilling my skin, and I saw it. The roof for the front porch--the porch where my sons waited for the bus every morning--was slowly twisting itself away from the house. The sound of the gentle screech of nails stripping themselves from wood reached me, and I thought I heard something splinter. Then the whole roof fell off to the side with a soft whoosh, landing in the snow. Since the snow was heavy and wet, there was no cliched cloud of white displaced. The roof simply fell. Falling snow immediately began to bury it.

The fallen roof stayed there, buried, until the stubbornly melting snows revealed it. It was rotted in many places, and it probably needed to be replaced, so I was happy the winter had brought it to the ground, making my demolition safer and easier. That’s how we rationalize things like winter destruction around here. We look for the upside.

There are lots of other stories that quantify this winter. Like the obnoxious bill for plowing. Or the flooding in the basement. Or the shredded pool cover. Or the shattered back stairs, victims of falling ice. They’re all ways of measuring winter, and they’re all going in my book.