“One must have a mind of winter…” Wallace Stevens from his poem, The Snow Man
The winter storm warning continues until noon today. It’s still dark and snowing hard. Chip has already shoveled the paths for us and the dogs, and we are waiting for Jack and his loader to open the driveway, again, so Chip can head to the lumberyard and close out the books for 2025, and for the last time. He’s retiring. It’s an ending and a beginning.
There has been a foot of snow since Jack’s last pass, and it’s drifted.
The Juneau kids left on yesterday’s ferry while I was up at the radio station for my weekly country show. I walked over the hill to town, figuring I can get myself anywhere on foot. The police said not to drive on Mud Bay Road, because of drifts, and past the cannery rigs were stuck in a big one.
Lutak Road has avalanched past the ferry.
The Haines Road is closed at the border.
Fireman Al even phoned in his weekly radio Safety Report.
You get the idea—
About noon, near KHNS, I stopped and talked to Richard as he paused from slicing the snow encasing his wife’s car. Richard is a cyclist, so he wasn’t worried about his heart, but he did say this was his workout today, and it was nice to be outside and they didn’t really need the car anyway.He asked me to play Mary Chapin Carpenter’s, I Feel Lucky.
Angie has been staying at the Chilkat Center since the blizzard began, as she couldn’t get back to her home, a few hills and drifts past ours, and Marley skied in.
On the air, it was my turn to play cheerful tunes and let everyone know the latest weather; to give the plow drivers room to work; that essential stores were open and the harbormaster wants boats shoveled. The fire chief asks that hydrants be dug out. The library is open until five, and the senior center van wasn’t running and there was no hot meal, but the doors were open and if you get there, they’ll make you a sandwich.
After the show, I walked to the lumberyard for a ride home from Chip. By 3:30 it was too dark to walk safely.
I am humming I Feel Lucky now—and will hold onto it for the New Year. Not because I’m foolishly hopeful, or willfully ignorant. (That is not bliss, actually.) Rather, it’s because I know what it means to be unlucky. Following my radio show, Skye came in for hers, and played music in memory of two of her Haines School classmates who died in an avalanche while visiting their families for the holidays a few years ago.
There’s that heartbreaking kind of unlucky, and then there’s the inevitable luck of the draw over who will be here next Christmas, next New Year’s and what changes will happen beyond our hearth and home—
If I choose to see the good luck of things, then hopefully, I will be able to handle the bad luck better.
I am thinking about ways to make that happen, to train, like Richard does—he rides his bike because he loves it. The long summer rides out the highway to the border and back give him the fitness to shovel on short winter days. So what will make my heart stronger? (Well, aside from working out?)
Smiling more, at friends and strangers, on purpose. Introducing myself, watching high school basketball games, reading library books, going out for coffee, swimming at the pool and bathing in the spring in Tenakee. Attending church. Volunteering. Being with my family. Making new friends and paying better attention to the old ones. Walking the dogs. More time with Chip, a lot more. Doing good work.
As Mary Chapin Carpenter also sings— a lucky year may be too much to expect, but it’s not too much to ask. May it be so for all of us.
And here is a poem for New Year’s Eve, From Mary Oliver, Wild Geese. It’s popular for a reason.
This is the version in my Good Poems anthology edited by Garrison Keillor.
