Gramps & I walking on the bay

There are so few places in the world that are truly quiet anymore. This one is not. It gets close sometimes, though, in the intervals between the arrival of the ferry when there are no cars on the roads. Our house sits alone in a field that has slowly transformed toward forest over the thirty years my parents have owned it, thanks largely to the diligent planting efforts of my Dad each spring. I had to work fast to beat the eager children out the back door of the log house and stride quickly down the path toward the marsh to find that quiet. Stopping beneath the bent bows of the bushes that arch overhead, I stopped breathing for as long as I could, just to listen. There is nothing like the deep thick quilt of winter quiet, interrupted only by the snow squeaking around the edges of my boots. It didn’t last long, of course, the children exploded from the house and poured past me in a chattering, giggling mass, skates, hockey sticks and sleds strung out behind them like a kite’s tail in a high wind. This is their favorite place in the whole world.

Getting ice skates on eight feet has more than once ruined my winter calm. I’ve considered buttering their feet to expedite the process more than once. Teaching kids to skate is downright funny. This year, with just a tinge of regret, I realized that those days are past. Only Ezra really needed much help with his skates and even he hopped right up and skated off as if he’d been doing this three times a week, instead of his last effort being two years ago. Their shouts rang through the weeds even when they were out of sight, ruining the winter silence, but leaving in it’s place the echoes of something even more precious. Grammy skated, humming the “skaters waltz” as she always does. Gramps doesn’t skate. He walks along behind, or ahead, depending on his mood, poking at the ice with an iron tipped cattle prod he brought back from somewhere interesting. Today he’s got a brown scarf tied to his head with a piece of old white webbing that looks like the stuff Tony and I use to tie our sleeping mats together so they don’t slide apart on the slick tent floor. He looks exactly like a crusty old shepherd from a Nativity play. Tony and I can’t skate. Our skates are wrapped in shiny red and blue paper beneath the tree up at the house… but we’re supposed to act surprised.

We walked out through the canals talking, laughing, and tracking. My Dad is always tracking. He’s got a whole menagerie of wild animals on this property and he quietly cultivates them in much the same way that he does his plants. “There’s br’er fox!” he announces to whichever boy is whizzing past on skates as he points the iron prod at the single file tracks along the edge of the reeds. “He’s out here thinking, “Now where’d I put that pheasant?” He stops to peer at a set of tracks that look for all the world like kangaroo tracks, only they’re about two centimeters long. He scratches his head with the end of his stick. “Hmm. Wonder what the heck those are? Who’s that little critter? Looks like a Maub dib mouse…” he giggles a little at his own joke. Further down a set of three toed bird tracks, relatively big ones, cross the canal from one side to the other, “Well! There’s br’er pheasant! That boy walks a long way. I followed his tracks for over a mile one day out here. He’s probably lookin’ for his wife. I’ve bought him three or four wives over the years and turned them loose out here, but he doesn’t seem to like them.” Tony and I laugh a little, “Maybe he doesn’t like the store bought girls, Dad, he’s got standards.” “Maybe he’s not Mormon,” quips Tony in response to the mail order brides my Dad has acquired… for the bird, that is.

Snow Angel

We walked a couple of miles and to the mouth of the bay twice before we found a canal that wasn’t blocked by huge pressure cracks and pools of open water between us and the bay. The ice is perfect, a rare pleasure on an island subjected to almost constant wind. I slid ahead of my men shuffling my feet on the glass surface and humming. The giant windmills waved their big arms slowly from across the big canal and I hollered that “Tomorrow I’m going to skate all the way to the village!” Which of course, I won’t, it’s about seven kilometers. Then again… I might. I lay down in a patch of windswept snow, the only one I could find that was big enough, and made a snow angel before sliding off again. The children were no where to be seen. They’d stayed among the reeds with their hockey puck and an admonition to, “Please don’t fall through a beaver hole or stick your foot in an otter run and get wet!” We passed more tracks and Dad told the story of following a wolf’s track when we’d lived up north and how he nearly fell down laughing watching the pup’s tracks veer off and scamper around, or run off to sniff a stick and then come back to walk quietly in Mother Wolf’s footprints in the manner that wolves do so that you can’t tell there’s more than one set of tracks. We all laughed at the Bambi-esque set of slippery deer tracks sliding and skating across the canal… right through the pack of coyote tracks… lucky deer.

We examined the Beaver’s work. This particular family of Beaver has evolved from nemesis to pet for my Dad. They almost killed him once, when he fell out of his canoe (having stood up after drinking too much tea) while hunting them… but that’s another story. He’s convinced that he’s got them trained, or that they’re evolving, one or the other, as they’ve taken to clearing only the scrub brush and overgrown sumac instead of his precious trees. Bucky and his boys have constructed a nice dam across one canal and have deposited a prodigious feed pile in the middle of the main canal. The kids skated carefully around those. The highlight of the afternoon, for the children, was finding an enormous, fat tadpole frozen just below the surface of the ice, looking for all the world like he’s coming up to check and see if it’s springtime yet. Ezra found a dead mouse, too, frozen in his little fur coat at the edge of the reeds. He must have gotten wet, is all we can figure. “Cool Mom! Not as good as the dead dog we found frozen out here in the ice though!” Announces one of the boys. The dead dog was a few years ago. This leads Grammy to tell the story of the three foot long frozen stiff snake she allowed my three year old daughter to drag home as a Christmas gift for me one year. The marsh is full of surprises.

The rest of the day was spent resting, reading, playing and eating. Hannah and Gabe practiced their combined country tune on fiddle and guitar in anticipation of visiting Bernard and Claire, my Dad’s ninety year old friends who still canoe clear around the island (27 miles long, 7 miles wide) every summer. They host barn dances and Hannah got to play “Turkey in the straw” when she was about six at one of their shin digs. For some reason they’ve latched on to our kids. We opened gifts from the Indiana grandparents around the tree and the kids hooted over new hats (“PERFECT for skating Mom!”) And lamented the pot scrubbers that Grandma’s Great had no doubt sent knowing THEY would be washing pots at the edge of the ocean this winter instead of Mom and would need them. They were passed around one by one and squished between little fingers, “I think these are going to be really good scrubbers, Mom!” Wearing their new stone bead bracelets from Aunt Michelle they headed to bed with their new books under their arms. Gabe’s 300+ page tome on Civil War Heros was met with much rejoicing, “I was reading this at their house Mom!! This is GREAT!” It explains the postage Grandpa’s Great had to pay for the box.

It’s Christmas morning now. I awoke early to rest and write. I love to sit in the cool dark of my childhood room and listen to my husband’s breath in the darkness and enjoy the ghosts in this place. I’m just now beginning to hear the creak of Grammy moving around, starting the oven for cinnamon rolls. Her parting words at bedtime were, “Whoever’s up first, set the oven to 350F for the buns!” Dad laughed, “We all know that’ll be YOU Lin’” The children must be reading their books, their room in ominously silent. I love the calm quiet that is Christmas morning here, but part of me misses the pudgy pile of toddler knees and elbows that used to pour onto our bed no later than 7:01 (first thing they learned was to tell time so Mama could sleep!) giggling and urging us to, “GET UP and open presents!” I have big kids now… the kind who like to read, who enjoy the anticipation, and who can be trusted not to fall through a beaver hole when skating without me in the marsh.