At left you see the vista as it looked this morning, twenty-four hours after an easy wind spread about ten inches of downy flake over Susquehanna Township. This time we were ready. I cleaned the refrigerator on Saturday and took a good inventory of the pantry -- normal tasks for the last weekend of the month. Before noon I was back from the Giant with a fresh supply of essentials: bread, milk, meat, cheese, two six-packs of Diet Dr. Brown Cream Soda, navel oranges, pasta night supplies, and toilet paper.

The snow began Sunday morning while we were in church. After the service, Lynn and I stopped at the office supply store for the display board she needs to complete her science project and a visit to a different market for more storm essentials: Moose Tracks ice cream, Campbell’s tomato soup in a jar (the Giant is strangely remiss in keeping this stocked), and fresh buttermilk (as opposed to the dehydrated stuff) for my raisin bran muffins and cherry brownies.

I spent most of the afternoon and early evening sitting at the kitchen table, which looks out on the vista pictured. I wrote some material synthesizing recent research I’d done on Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson, and did some research on Pennsylvania German samplers. I also spent a good deal of time looking out the window, the proportion of looking time to writing time increasing as the shadows lengthened.

After supper the kids took to cleaning the driveways and sidewalks, so the wind’s sweep was overcome by the snowblowers’ hum and the shovels’ scrapes. By 10:00 all was quiet again, the rate of snowfall had abated, and the street lamps “on the crest of the new-fallen snow gave a luster of midday to objects below.” 

It was an easy snow to clear away, and most schools decided to open late instead of cancel. By nine this morning we were back to normal, but with fresh bran muffins and deer tracks down the snow-covered swale and into our back yard.

To me, Frost’s lovely poem is all about introspection, that going within to probe our
questions and our fears. It’s an inner journey told in terms of an outer -- a person driving a horse-drawn vehicle that evidently makes frequent stops at farmhouses lingers for a moment to watch a wooded area beside a lake fill with snow. The metaphorical possibilities are many.

Because I’ve lived in the northeast United States all my life, my spirituality and personal growth endeavors tend to follow a seasonal pattern in which the spring is for discovery, the summer for development, the autumn for harvesting what has been learned, and the winter for pondering what has been gleaned and nurturing the seeds for the new cycle. 

I wonder sometimes how people who have lived all their lives in warm places such as southern California fashion their inner lives. What metaphors do people from desert places use for what I call “going into the woods?” 

Robert Frost himself was actually born in California, but he returned to the northeast when he was eleven, after his father’s death. Educated at Dartmouth and Harvard (although he graduated from neither), his experiences as a New England farmer and teacher inform his work. He wrote a poem called “Desert Places,” but it uses a snow-covered open field with “weeds and stubble showing last” as a metaphor for one’s inner issues. 

Perhaps one of my readers from a warmer clime or a different spiritual tradition can
enlighten me. For now, I remain in the snow-covered woods of my heart, until the
promises I must keep call me out.