"Never treat life casually"

“Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ....Get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually.”
– Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907-1972)

Most days during the past two weeks brought at least a coating – and often several inches – of the kind of light, powdery snow that falls when temperatures barely climb above teens. So each morning, the world outside looked newly draped. The pine trees along the new driveway (above) especially caught my eye on one of the few days that the sun appeared, the green needles and clean whiteness of the snow set against the bright blue sky. The plum and peach trees (below left and right, respectively) made nice silhouettes against the snow, but offered no hint of their summer grandeur, until a closer inspection showed the patient buds.

Along with the snow, the new year began with the company of good friends and an appreciation of human creativity. New Year’s Eve, we had dinner with our friends Jeff, Stephanie, Connor and Asa. We brought salad (greens and winter radishes) and a bag of cooking greens that I had picked a few days earlier, just before the snows began. They offered garlic bread, a beet salad, spaghetti with tomato sauce and pesto from their garden, and mead from a nearby farm.

Baby mustard greens grown under plastic covered "low tunnel" (Dec. 27)

After dinner and some urging, Jeff took us to see the cold storage he had dug some years back – a hobbit-size crawl space off one corner of the basement fronted by a beautiful thick wooden door. Originally built many decades ago for a walk-in freezer at Purity, an Ithaca-based ice-cream company, the door provided wonderful insulation from the warmer temperatures of the wood stove heated basement. The crawl space itself, lined with cinder blocks open to the cool, moist climate of the surrounding soil, was filled with potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips and other root vegetables from their garden. When we went home at 10 pm, having all agreed that it was midnight somewhere, we left behind the uneaten bag of cooking greens and took with us a bag of Stephanie’s beets.

Stephanie's beets, roasted and ready for eating

Saturday morning, we were soon on our way to Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks before dawn, to visit Matt and Maria, friends of Richard’s from college, their children, Max and Morgan, and Matt’s parents’ Mark and Mary. There, while most enjoyed the creativity of a variety of new board games, Mark showed me his lovely wood carvings, including a collection of “wood spirits” that appeared to more be found than created. When he said he could teach me to carve one in less than an hour, I jumped at the chance.

We worked with the bark of the cottonwood tree, an extremely thick, deeply ridged, and soft medium. Cottonwood trees, I learned, grow rings of outer bark each year, just as they do the rings of inner wood.

In reality, carving the wood spirit took three hours. But Mark is a patient teacher, and I, an eager student. He sent me home with a tool catalog and two more pieces of cottonwood bark.

My first wood spirit carving (Jan. 1, 2010)

Two cottonwood trees grow at the entrance to our new driveway. When I’m more confident and practiced, I may experiment with coaxing wood spirits to show themselves in the standing trees. For now, I’ll look for fallen branches and downed trees.

At mid-month, those new year celebrations seem some time ago. The days are now noticeably longer. Stephanie's beets were roasted and eaten, their natural winter sweetness requiring no additional effort. A mid-January thaw is imminent, with temperatures suddenly climbing to the nearly 40, and expected to remain there through the middle of next week. I will dig around the hoop tunnels this weekend to see what remains of our greens. I intentionally left them buried for the past two weeks so that the snow would act as additional insulation against the frigid temperatures. Who, but the hardiest of the garden snails, knows what lies below.