Dumples in the Snow

Four more inches of snow fell here today and we are supposed to get up to nine inches more overnight. Life in Vermont, indeed. I am in our sunroom in front of the fire with a chicken slowly cooking in broth and wine with wild rice, mushrooms, onions and clementines in the Schlemmertopf (German clay cooker).

Paul, Nokie and I didn't head out for our usual walk along Baker Brook, up Beetlestone, a long, sloping hill, and down Parish Hill until 3:30 PM. It was sunny earlier, but the sky had become overcast and gray. We complained about the cold more than usual and as we set out were already imagining the hot cup of tea and a fire when we got home. Still, we noticed, as we always do, the extraordinary and ever-changing natural ice and stone sculptures that are made by the freezing, melting and refreezing of the river. Broken shelves of snow-capped ice are piled up along the edges, and the river (which it is, really, though it is called a brook) was rushing furiously around little islands of ice and snow-covered rocks.

"Look," Paul said, as we set out past the concrete bridge, "a heart." He pointed to a snowy ice formation in the river that looked just like a big heart. Over the twelve years we lived on Cape Cod together, he collected for me many heart-shaped stones from his many hours of beachcombing.

It became windy as we walked and the trees began shaking down mini-blizzards of snow from their branches so that our lashes and eyebrows were dusted white. We plucked a little icicle from the funny whisker of our dog. He has one whisker that curls down, not up like the others, because he could not resist, despite Paul's warnings, the bacon hanging from the electric fence around our neighbor's beehives this summer. Some local beekeepers lure the bears this way just to teach them a permanent (they hope) lesson. Many a season of hard work and honey as been carried off, hive and all, into the woods by bears. Paul didn't catch Nokie in time before he heard a loud yelp. Other than the partially-singed whisker, Nokie was fine.

It was cold, white and silent on our walk and we saw no one and no cars, except two snow plows. Reaching the crest of Beetlestone Hill is always the reward. As we approached it, walking up the long, slow incline, we could see a cathedral of snowy trees lining each side of the road. At the top, a small, ancient graveyard (with a few Revolutionary soldiers buried in it) is on the right, toward the western mountains, while to the southeast, we look out over the valley and can see in the distance a circle of white on the top of a mountain, which we know to be the clearing where the Kane's post and beam house and goat farm is located. Kane is a retired petroleum executive and raises goats to be sold as meat in restaurants in New York and elsewhere. Across from the entrance to Kane's mountaintop farm is Amazing Planet, a little farm run by a young couple, where I buy fresh eggs year-round and produce in the summer and fall.

At the end of our walk, a loop less than two miles long, we came down Parish Hill and crossing the concrete bridge, Paul pointed to the strange shapes in a plowed bank of snow: angular frozen snow cubes could be seen under a blanket of fresh, soft snow.

"What do you call those?" I said.

"Dumples," Paul said, and it made me think of chicken dumplings underneath a thin layer of gravy.