Snow labyrinth

It is after midnight and I just put an egg strata in the fridge for our brunch guests tomorrow. I aim to make blueberry muffins in the morning too. It is nice to have friends and neighbors over on these very cold winter days. It brings a humanizing warmth that is lost sometimes when it is so persistently cold and the branches are so bare. We do have snow on the ground, but it is hard-packed and the landscape needs a fresh, soft snow to transform and reawaken it. Ironically the Midwest and South have gotten much more snow than we have.Paul and I felt rather gloomy on our walk today and nothing particularly inspired us, not the light or the frozen ice-sculptures in the river.

When we got back to the house, Nokie ran, barking wildly around the side of our house. Paul ran after him and I could hear him laughing. When I got to our backyard, it was our neighbor, Bruce, making a surprise labyrinth on the slope of the hill by imprinting circles in the snow with his snowshoes. Just before Christmas, he surprised us with an ice luminaria that he set on our breezeway. We put votive candles inside and lit them on the night Megan and her boyfriend drove up from Cape Cod.

This afternoon, we asked Bruce inside for tea and I rustled up bits of this and that: some remaining smoked oyster dip and rosemary crackers, a clementine and some orange-chocolate. He is such a character and has many adventures hiking, fishing and snowshoeing on his own, once or twice running into bears. He makes sculptures out of wood, stone, wire and many found objects and things he scavenges from different places. He has been known to leave cairns, or stone and wire sculptures in the midst of remote hiking paths as a surprise for passing hikers. Once he took dozens of shoes (all mismatched ones that had washed up downriver) and placed them on a log that jutted out into the water. The Rock River flows eastward along the edge of our property, under the covered bridge, and curves around behind his house and toward town. It is a tributary of the West River, which in turn, feeds into the Connecticut River.

Bruce's snow labyrinth and his spontaneous company at tea is all we needed to perk us up and remind us, again, of this very nice life we find ourselves living in Vermont.