Gratitude is different than thanks, don’t you think? It’s deeper, like a base layer in the language of appreciation. It’s been snowing and snowing now for most of November. As Chip said today looking out at the heavy flakes falling like mittens as my friend Becky says, “I’d feel better about this if it were January.” I kept the porch furniture out this fall, planning the outdoor gatherings we’d have on starry evenings, and maybe even on Thanksgiving. You know, like they do in Sweden.
Guess it will just be the two of us. (My dad went to my sister’s house this week.) Still, when the snow is falling, I am thankful for the fire and twinkling lights inside, and the quiet brightness out the window. But when I step out into it and posthole to where I need to go, the beach say, to walk the dogs, it’s not so wonderful. Until I strap on snowshoes (thankfully) and then stomp a trail down to the shore, and back up, and then out around what I call “the block” but is really a little forest between the beach and the road. I snowshoe down to Carr’s Cove and back, making a loop in the woods and on the beach. Three trips takes about an hour. When I am done there is a trail. A surprisingly even, perfect trench as wide as my snow shoes, about eight inches deep, and firm as dirt that holds until the next snow fall, for snowshoers, skiers and walkers. (Swedes, if there are any visiting, would nod approval.) If you step off the trail though, you may sink up to your thigh.
A few weeks ago, I was walking off the trail and on top of a hard wind blown crust out in the open about a half mile from the house with the dogs, and it was blowing a gale and about 9 degrees, when the top layer let go and I fell in a hole to my hips and pitched forward, with my poles planted, face down. After I recovered from the shock, and realized I was stuck, I thought, “It’s possible I could die here.” Who would find me? Who would even be looking for me? Dad was sound asleep in the window seat. He could rest right through the dinner hour if I am not there to turn on the lights and radio and bang the pots around. Chip was deer hunting down in Elfin Cove. The dogs were with me, but my golden retrievers are not Lassie or Rin-tin-tin types that would run for help, barking and tug on the coat of a stranger on the road. They would stay with me until we all froze to death.
Oh stop it, I thought. This is your brain on too much Covid news.
And so I did the wild scramble, flail and groaning oomph that Brave Irene does in the children’s book of the same name when she falls in the deep snow while chasing the ball gown her mother made that blows away in blizzard. (William Steig wrote it. I love it.) Anyway, like Brave Irene, I survived, but I think it was the beginning of my now tweaky back. (I have a heating pad on it.) That, and lifting a 25 lb. kettle bell too quickly when I was late for a Zoom weight class, and then running up the stairs with it. Which means that today I could not snowshoe. I can’t even bend over to strap them on. Instead, Chip packed the path to the shore and cut a step down the thick slab of snow to the beach so my friend Beth and I could walk our dogs in a blizzard on wet cobbles and sand.
Afterward, I thanked Chip, and Beth too for walking a little slower than we usually do. For saving the day. For being my husband and my friend. (This is my heart on too much Covid news. Wide open. That’s not a bad side effect.) But what I want to tell you, is that thank you is not what I really mean at all. It’s gratitude that I feel. A whole body and soul gratitude that resonates in my being the way chanting “vu” in a deep voice for a long exhale does (try it)– Sort of like a tuning fork to the heart.
