How many times have I left a brown and gray city, in the chilly ghost of a climate change winter, and driven north only to find that, by the time I reach Grove City, it’s full blown Hibernus? Then, as I go further and further north, leaving the interstate and taking to the backroads, the lanes grow narrower, and the trees draw nearer, and the temperatures drop, and the snow deepens. I had to dig this driveway out by hand on Friday morning of last week, the same morning I dug my neighbor’s car out of the snow where she got stuck while driving her child to school (which they never cancel up in those parts).
I love that about my almost-weekly journey up to my other life: I seem to journey into a whole other climate, another realm altogether. It’s consistently 5 to 10 degrees cooler up there, and there’s snow all winter. Last year, we had a brown Christmas in Pittsburgh, but then we went to our place up north for the night, and had a white Christmas as daylight faded. When I left Pittsburgh last Thursday after work, the city was in its usual chilly gray wintertime garb—without snow, as usual. By the time I got up north, it was a friggin’ blizzard. I love it. I love being snowbound up there and watching it falling among the trees.
One of my favorite sights is a snowy deciduous forest—where dark tree trunks stand out against a perfectly white forest floor. I went up this past Thursday to bring my older daughter home from college for Christmas break. Because she’s minoring in Arabic, she’ll be spending next semester in Jordan. I know better than to worry too much about that. I was even younger than her when I spent a summer homeless on a beach in France after having been robbed my first night in Paris. There are few joys greater than travel. Do we even know ourselves before we have another culture to compare our assumptions to? Can we even say that we speak our native tongues without some working knowledge of the world’s other languages? Travel and living abroad make a person wiser, and more accepting, and far more interesting.
These are the things I say to myself, and they mostly allay my fears about letting my child go off to see the world alone. But…well. It’s also true that when I was her age, I knew how to stay out of trouble and how to throw a punch if staying out of trouble wasn’t an option. (I had three brothers…) Jordan is a very quiet country with a whole lot less violent crime than the United States. She should be the one worried to leave an old man like myself back here.
She’ll be fine. I guess my real issue with her studying overseas is the fact that I will be out of reach. I was always there when she was sick or scared or lonely. I was mother and father to both my daughters (in their mother’s constant absence). It’s no use being too sentimental about such things, but it does make it hard to see them go to live in the Middle East.
My bird friends were so, so hungry when I got up north. The deep snow makes it hard for them to find seeds to eat, and the bugs are all gone for the season. Never before had I seen such a convocation at my bird feeders: dark-eyed juncos by the dozens, many black-capped chickadees, no small number of tufted titmice, a hairy woodpecker—which is a beautiful creature with a ridiculous name—a few graceful nuthatches, sleek and elegant, and even a blue jay and a cardinal, which had never deigned to visit my feeders before.
The thing about beautiful times and places is that they give you a strength that you can take with you anywhere. They multiply their beauty to you, and it comes back to shelter you in a cold season. I hope I’ve given my children that, now that I see them fledging. As for me, there’s very little I want except to commune with trees and observe birds. Jordan, of the world’s many peaceful places. She’s only going to Jordan. Hell, I went to Cameroon when I was four years older than her and spent 5 years. Oh, how I missed the snow during that half-decade-long summer.
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