Mountain ghost

What I might have once called a rare winter thaw seems to be increasingly less rare the longer I spend in western New York, where the weather changes rapidly and everyone loves to talk about it.

The change from negative-degree temperatures and wind chills and nights where the snow squeaked painfully beneath booted feet as I hurried from car to house began on Monday as snow, then ice, then rain fell over the hills, turning what had been clearly-defined slopes of white snow and black trees into softer hues of rose-gray and slate, ice coating each individual twig and branch, setting the trees to crackling every time the wind so much as puffed. Hills upon hills faded into the sky, the clouds hanging low and the roads turning to slick slush as evening fell.

Fog rose in thick patches, floating up into the warming air from dense patches of snow in the darkest parts of the forest, veiling the roads at the highest points, hiding the passage of trees and trees until it was impossible to tell if I was moving at all, the headlights illuminating a wall of cloud all around me. For split moments the fog cleared to reveal a glimpse of the yellow line on the road, a tree cased in ice, a mailbox with reflectors.

Along the Vandermark road the fog drifted, loose and thin, layers moving on layers until I took my foot off the gas quickly, seeing a deer moving elegantly in the shapes of mist, the car coasting as I adjusted my vision to the fog that contained no shapes at all, no deer of white and silver as I had thought I had seen, starting to accelerate again until I saw a real deer, a flesh and blood deer, watching my passage from the ice-encased shrubs at the side of the road.

And then dropping down the backside of the big hill as I began my descent into the valley, a sudden clearing, back into a world so clear that the colors of winter night seemed saturated, the blackness of the woods even more hollow and cavernous, the remaining piles of wet snow whiter and brighter. In the first moment of clarity I caught out of the corner of my eye a towering moose just feet off the road.

Not a moose, after my heart stopped for a beat–just a pine tree, laden with snow, looking nothing at all like a moose on second glance. Just a tired mind seeing a ghost from mountains and mountains ago, shapes taking the image of the dwellers of wet snow in late spring, the gray and green of pine forests in the last snowfalls of June, the clouds hanging low over the river valley, blending with woodsmoke from the great loft chimney.

This evening the fog did not hang in thick banks but curled across the road in grasping tendrils, fingers winding along the asphalt, reaching for something they could never grasp, twining along in ways I thought only existed in film. The air hangs heavy now, fog dissipated into humidity, the fingers dissolved into the night, the ghosts all around this little house and the silent woods. The valley holds its breath, the night as thick and black as ink, impenetrable by light or sound.

Unfinished thoughts

I shut the lights off downstairs one by one, the kittens crunching away on a midnight snack on the bench, Yoda drinking silently and Sage winding around my feet. The last light to be extinguished was the candle on top of the stove, casting a flickering light around the room, transforming it to any cabin at any time in any place. As I exhaled and the flame vanished, I could see outside, to the world beyond my porch, out the two windows and the sliding porch door, the world transformed into mist faintly lit by the full harvest moon, as though nothing existed beyond this moment here and now, me and my animals and my little house, surrounded by a fog to take us away a hundred years into the future or past.

Spell

I headed west out of Alfred village this evening beneath a streaked sky of blue, pink, orange and gray, one of those odd evenings of light in which nothing has a shadow but everything is shaded, the air is heavy with moisture but the sky is so beautiful everything feels weightless. Before I was hardly out of the village mist was already appearing in the low places along the road, every little hollow and depression. As I headed up Moland to the place where the road meets the sky I could see the bowls of the valleys filling with a thick mist through which nothing was visible; the bends in the roads off in the distance simply vanished. Above me where the mists began to thin dark thunderheads were building, towering high above the hills and promising rain later.

The further away from town I drove the more enchanted the hills became, dark islands in a lake of mist, the pinkorangegold rays of the setting sun veiled enough to give everything some unearthly glow, the bases of the thunderclouds hidden as though they arose like mountains. I turned down my little valley road and evening fell abruptly around me, the very air around the car getting darker the further I drove. I turned my radio down and slowed my drive, feeling suddenly as though I was intruding on something very special.

Colors were saturated as I parked my car; the baskets I had hung on the porch were alternately almost too-bright blue or crisp white, bright against the greenblack damp pines fading into low clouds behind the house. From the balcony the forest looked never-ending, marching on to the hills and beyond, the edge of an enchanted kingdom in the mist.

As I let Sage out I stood for a moment under the dripping pine trees at the edge of the porch, breathing in deep, slow lungfuls of sweet and spicy air. The bullfrogs in the now-bank-full creek winding around the edge of my property like a moat were croaking in relay; a deep croak from the bank near my feet would start a chain of croaks downstream, around the bend, in a cluster of voices from the grove across the yard, and back again. The singing peeper frogs never stopped as a nightbird or two voiced their eerie cries from the woods. I brought Sage back inside and headed upstairs just as it began to rain, the drops echoing loud off the metal roof of the lofty room. Thunder grumbled, caught in the valley and rolling about the trees before fading away back to the sky again.

It’s raining quietly now and I am sitting, alone, with the cat at my feet, the pattering hush of drops on the roof the only sound now. Magical or not, this little house in this little hollow is home.