Two tramps in snow time

The snow lays itself gently on branches like a Bob Ross painting, dabbed on with the gentlest knife-edge. My cheeks are hot and cold from walking down to the bus with Eleanor. We timed it perfectly again, just a hundred feet past the corner and in view of the stop sign as Ted pulled up in bus 43 to pick her up where Durham and Moody Road meet.

They've replaced the street sign again – a month or two back it disappeared. Gemma was the first to notice: “Where Moody Road?” And it was indeed gone as a loose tooth, with no money under the pillow next morning. They brought the stop sign back first, and a few weeks later, the street sign atop it “Moody Rd.” I suppose someone decided it would make a nice wall hanging: I'd say for a temperamental spouse, but there are enough Moodys around these parts that it may just be a vanity plate for someone's driveway.

Eleanor didn't want to wear her snowsuit again. It bunches up her pants too much, I think. It's uncomfortable. Damn is it heartbreakingly cute to see a five-year old all gussied up like that, though. Fruit-loop blue and red polar fleece scarf and her mom's green hat. Day-glo paisley backpack and pink boots with the white fur around the tops. That's gotta be how Santa's elves look on their way to school.

The delay in getting the suit on got us out the door five minutes late, eating up the five minute safety buffer I set aside. And we had to stop and talk to Ken for a minute. He pulled up in his buckskin-brown pickup, wished Eleanor well at school, said he wasn't sure if he ought to maybe put his plow on. That truck looks naked without the plow. He said the weatherman was asking for this to turn to rain later today – said it'd be in the 50's tomorrow. Ken plows our drive. We actually live in Ken's old house – he and Diane live just down the street. Ken was wearing his “Maine State Lottery” ball cap. They took an awful nice haul in the lottery last year. Sometimes good things do happen to the right people.

He slowed us down just a tad too much, though, and left us hurrying down that last dip and up around the corner. But there was Ted, and El could walk almost straight onto the bus. She waved. We blew kisses and the bus left me alone with the snow.

Not quite alone: two weaving trails, one big and dragging, one smaller and lighter. Here they cross the road to the outside of the curve and the little ones are on the edge. Back again, and the little ones dance for a minute near the middle. They're joined and shepherded back to side again. They meet and scuffle each other up for awhile. Maybe an Indian tracker could tell who led and who followed. Where one passed the other, where one stopped to scoop up a ready-made snowball to throw. Where they stopped to listen to the stream, and see the delicate glass latticework of a higher water frozen in place and hanging from naked brambles.

I replay this as I rewind the walk, retracing our sinusoidal loops and arcs with a dogged vector pointing home. To the top of the rise and the field where skulls of yellow apples still cling to calloused branches. Past the three mailboxes crooked as old fenceposts, wearing little white yarmulkes of snow. The power lines cut the sky with a long swooping slash, a drop-shadowed, black-and-white exclamation point, their clarity increasing as the snow piles, sharpening the black.

And as the snow piles, the two trails go soft. The edges rounding, blurring, fading. At the porch the footsteps are almost anonymous. Circumstantial evidence that, yes, someone passed this way, but nothing more. The symmetry itches. I know it's the kind that you can only make worse by scratching. Inside is a fire to tend. Maybe Marsey will have the kettle on.