http://www.vpr.net//audio/programs/56/2013/02/Lange-0204-Little Bits of Winter.mp3
(Host) Tropical vacations get quite popular this time of year in New England. But commentator and storyteller Willem Lange thinks there are so many delightful little things to keep us occupied that just being here is a vacation.
(Lange) To many people, especially the elderly, winter in northern New England stretches out to a horizon too distant even to think about. In the old days, legend has it, the old folks were taken outside during the first long cold snap, laid down in watering troughs, and frozen into blocks of ice. In the spring, they were brought inside and thawed out, with no apparent ill effects. They were given some hot porridge and brought up to date on the news. Nowadays, those who can manage it, go south. Those of us who can't are left to contemplate the hundreds of little things that make up our winter.
One of these is walking on snow and ice. I noticed once, years ago, that the Inuit in the airport terminal in Montreal all walked with a little shuffling step, even on dry granite floors. My buddy Dudley had spent years living in the Far North. Try to imagine how you'd walk, he said, if you spent almost all your life on ice or hard snow wearing mukluks with soles like carpet slippers. You'd shuffle, too. He's right. And watching people downtown after a winter storm, you can see right away why penguins walk the way they do.
We go to bed after dark and get up before dawn. The air in the house is as dry as in the Sahara. When we handle our clothes in the dark, they sparkle with dozens of tiny lightning flashes.
I put out corn for the wild turkeys that pass through the yard every day or two. But the first to find it were a flock of mallards. We're surrounded by tall pines and spruces, and there's no open water nearby. How can ducks, flying through the trees at forty miles an hour, spot a couple of handfuls of corn that've sunk into the snow?
The Old Farmer's Almanac keeps me up to date. It kills me to lay down seven bucks for it; but I can check the locations of the winter constellations, the phase of the moon, and the return of the sun. By mid-January we've gained only about half an hour. But then things begin to pick up, and by mid-February we're up almost two hours.
Our coldest days are also our sunniest days. This once made less difference than it does now, because traditional New England houses were - as an architect friend of mine called them - boxes with little holes poked in them. But we've gotten smarter, and windows a lot better. We built our house with the living room facing solar south and a whole wall of windows. To sit in my recliner with the sun upon my neck and shoulders, working on a crossword puzzle till I doze and my pen traces a long, erratic line across the page, is perhaps one of the greatest joys of a northern winter. Why would anybody want to live near the equator where every day is much the same? What would there be to look forward to?
This is Willem Lange in Montpelier, and I gotta get back to work.
