If it were just me, I’d leave it all right where it lies.
I’ve already (I say already, but look at that, it’s after 10) shoveled a path from the back door to the birdfeeder because that’s what I do from my desk, watch the birds. Some good music, a hot coffee, a clean window, a bag of birdseed. Is there much else? I like Nathaniel Rateliff and the Night Sweats.

Some fine music there and I have recently rediscovered the astonishing work of Richie Havens. I saw Richie Havens perform “Here comes the Sun” at Woodstock. Or that’s how I remember it. If I watched the Woodstock movie I might be disproven. Havens was a giant star in the late Sixties and early Seventies, and when I listen to him now there is such empathy and pathos in his voice and guitar performance – simple and complex at the same time – that he actually does tear the coverings off the scars on your soul. He takes all the turmoil (and I would say there is almost as much of that now, culturally, as there was then) and gives you a way out, a ray of hope, a piece of the sun. Plus, he was a Greenwich Village person and could be seen about town and dated, briefly (many dates were gratefully brief back then), the sister of a college friend. I wonder how today’s young hear his music.

If it were just me…but it’s not and come tomorrow morning my wife has to get to work. Knowing my irregularities and the vagaries of country living and being from Utica, she always has a backup plan. If the driveway is still plugged with snow tomorrow morning, her backup plan is to snowshoe to the elementary school in Walden where she teaches third grade. I think she would be disappointed if she retired without hiking to the school on snowshoes at least once…just because…that’s the kind of girl she is. She actually puts notches in her belts, I think, like the notch for the time she rode her bike from Buffalo to Albany. Hiking to school on snowshoes would be a really good notch for her and of course the kids would love it too watching the snow melt off the metal snowshoes with their strappings, dripping onto the child-proof floors. “Mrs. Phelps WALKED to school in snowshoes!” “What?” “How do you put them on?”

After each paragraph, I do some snow shoveling and I am getting closer and closer to the skid steer. I use the skid steer to clean the half mile of driveway. We love living deep in the woods. This is the cost of that joy. I probably could blast out the driveway with the four-wheeled Tacoma like I did the night our daughter was born thirty years ago in a similarly aggressive storm and with the truck gas gauge on empty. But it’s better to clean the lane up now, with rain on the way, and heavy cold after that, no need for a frozen, iced driveway.

My next trip out, I will see if it starts. The batteries are old, but the block heater is on and I have a good portable battery to give it a shot in the lead.

Ok, it started with the special starting battery, whatever you call it, and the driveway is done and the turning circles and the mailbox cleared and it was a beautiful snow, heavy and white. And my wife did some cross-country skiing with the dog running beside her in ecstasy, trampling and hunting mice and rabbit. The work went well, and the driveway will not turn to ice come what may, you know, like the rest of winter.

The teacher will have to save snowshoeing to school for another storm. I’m sure it will happen. Maybe that skid steer might intentionally not start one day.

I’m back at my desk with Havens singing San Francisco Bay Blues from a place of yearning and regret, a cup of piping afternoon tea, purple finches and red-breasted woodpeckers at the feeder. How good is life? It can’t be measured.