Waking Up to Winter in the Mountains
I thought inside was quiet until I opened the sliding glass door of the log cabin balcony. When the seal was broken, inside became a turbulent detonation of noise—the clicks of the heater are an angry percussionist, the ambient hum of the humidifier a raging swarm of bees, the creak of the floorboards falling timber—compared to the sacred stillness of the snowy morning.
My breath catches in my throat—for that, too, now sounds like a howling wind against the silence. Stepping out onto the wooden porch outside my bedroom, my eyes—recently rubbed free of their sleep—wander across the landscape: white. White. White! My eyes are blinded by the purity of the snow, my heart stabbed with utter joy and awe. Everything, from the towering pine trees that cling to the steep mountainside, to the little red fence post that splits a nearby ridge, is capped with snow hats that grow taller with each flake.
I can taste the cold. It turns my breath to clouds and my nose to a cherry. My fingers sting in protest and I tuck them under my armpits. My knees bounce, my jaw shivers, my toes wiggle in my slippers but I dare not make a sound. I tiptoe inside to wrap a throw blanket around my shoulders, hugging it tightly under my chin, then return to the scene.
Tracks on the trail to the cabin reveal where we drove the Jeep the day before, softened like water erosion by the freshly fallen snow. They make it seem as though we’ve been here decades, rather than a night. The road ends in a sheer drop. I know because the mighty sentinels that look down upon our paradise at the end of the lane also look up at us from below, their tips in a pattern of pointed pines. Likewise, they speckle the slopes under a haze on the horizon, miniaturized as if in a snow globe, flattened by a layer of opaque mist. How do their roots hold on at such an angle, and for so long, as the earth shifts and changes?
Thudding like horse’s hooves reaches my ears, and I turn to see a clump of snow crumble from a pine tree’s heavily drooping branches. It springs up as the weight leaves it, a cloud of feather-light powder snow floating behind where the mound fell. When all is still once more, I can distinguish the quiet pips of newly forming icicle runoff and the echoing caw and trills of distant birds. Another rumble, akin to thunder, moans from the other side of a far off mountain range. It crackles and pops, soft and terrible all at once, and I recognize it: an avalanche. I smile. What wily temptress is Nature, who can calm the soul with dancing fairies of fractals in one moment, and demolish an ecosystem with that same snow in the next.
Humbled, I return to my sanctuary to delight in a fresh pot of coffee and the simple pleasure that is breakfast, shared with the one I love.
