September 30: Days Grew Shorter, Cold, Prayer for Winter

The autumn days grew shorter, Lurvy brought the squashes and pumpkins in from the garden and piled them on the barn floor, where they wouldn't get nipped on frosty nights.  The maples and birches turned bright colors and the wind shook them and they dropped their leaves one by one to the ground.  Under the wild apple trees in the pasture, the red little apples lay thick on the ground, and the sheep gnawed them and the geese gnawed them and foxes came into the night and sniffed them.  One evening, just before Christmas, snow began falling.  It covered house and barn and fields and woods.  Wilbur had never seen snow before.  When morning came he went out and plowed the drifts in his yard, for the fun of it.  Fern and Avery arrived, dragging a sled.  They coasted down the lane and out onto the frozen pond in the pasture.

It's a beautiful picture that E. B. White paints in the space of a few lines.  The book moves from autumn to Christmas in the space of eight gorgeous sentences.  Pumpkins and squashes and red little apples.  Snow and drifts and a frozen pond.  It's a time-lapse paragraph, like one of those films you saw in science class in high school.  The flower sprouts, grows, opens, waves frenetically for a few seconds, then curls, drops petals, and shrinks back into the earth.


Weather in the Upper Peninsula is like that, as well.  For example, this past Sunday was warm, almost humid, with lots of sun and temperatures near eighty degrees.  By Monday morning, rain and fog moved in, and the thermometer didn't climb too much above forty degrees.  Last night, I could almost taste winter in the air.  Time-lapse weather.

As I was waiting to pick up my son from religion class, I listened to a little conversation a man and woman were having about the coming winter.  She was complaining how cold it was, and he said something like, "Well, the Farmer's Almanac says this winter's going to be worse than last winter.  More snow.  Colder."

I couldn't listen much beyond that.  I began having visions of snow drifted up to the roof of my house and water lines freezing solid for months.  School children trapped at home because breathing outside is like swallowing icicles.  Last winter was bad.  Usually, I don't mind the gray and white of December through early March.  When that gray and white stretches into April and May, I begin to get a little anxious.

Last winter cost the communities of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan a lot of money.  In my home town, the streets are still cratered and unpaved in places, looking like bombed-out war zones.  I'm talking millions of dollars in damage from the cold and ice.  We've barely recovered, and already the cold weather is almost upon us again.

So, I have a little prayer for winter tonight.  I'm praying that it arrives late and leaves early, like a surprise visit from a irritating brother-in-law.  The quicker and shorter the visit, the better.  That's my hope.  Too many families lived without running water for weeks on my street last year.  I don't want to see people going through that again.  I don't want to go through it, myself.  So I'm removing the welcome mat from my front stoop.

When that irritating brother-in-law shows up with snow and ice and dark, Saint Marty's going to pretend he's not home.

Hoping it's wrong