Gifts From the Cold
Temperatures have dropped below 0 every night for the past three weeks.
Daytime highs have hovered somewhere around 0 on most of those days.
Dry cold is easier to tolerate than wet cold.
This has been a wet cold.
Snow has been building up, although I couldn’t say when much fell. It just gradually became deeper.
This white powder won’t provide much moisture, but it should get the grass started this spring.
This one less worry leaves room to contemplate how cold is cumulative.
For a couple of cold nights, cattle and sheep don’t seem to notice.
The tractor might start a bit slower in the morning, but it fires up.
The water troughs might ice over, but the floats don’t freeze and the pipes remain thawed.
My face tingles a bit while I roll out hay for the livestock, but it warms up.
After a three-week marathon of frigid weather, the tractor barely groans to life even after I plug it in for hours, a frozen water line to a trough won’t thaw for a month, the cattle hunch behind a windbreak and my skin crackles.
Time tenses and slows in the dingy, gray-blue cold, too.
Jobs just take longer – starting the tractor, feeding the cows and sheep, walking to the barn in 30 pounds of warm coats and boots, breaking ice – nothing happens fast.
The sheep huddle near the barn and out of the wind until the midday sun warms them so they wander to the hay for a hearty brunch.
A cottontail hunkers among lambs in the pen, waiting me out, learning to accept my periodic presence instead of dashing away from food and warmth.
Three of the horses cock their hind legs, patient in the protection of the barn.
But another horse rebels against tense, slow time.
He rolls in the powdery snow, then gallops across the pasture, kicking his heels and laughing at the bitter cold.
I watch the other horses’ reactions.
I think I spot the eldest rolling his eyes.
Cold cloudy days stifle hope, but blue skies bring squinting optimism.
When the forecast predicts sunshine and a 40-degree swing to above-freezing temperatures, all of us breathe a collective sigh of relief.
That sigh reminds me that there is no place on earth that I would rather be than at my ranch.
My ranch offers a sanctuary from all of the chaos, societal demands, and thought bullets that come at me from every direction.
Groceries, bills, daily news, business plans, ideas for novels, meat deliveries, water protection efforts – some of these feel like unstoppable tanks rolling over me and some feel like sweet juicy oranges that must be picked from the tree before they rot.
All demand my immediate attention.
But the land demands nothing from me.
It waits while I floor my pickup to blast through snowdrifts, then waits longer while I shovel snow from under the truck and back out of the drift I couldn’t blast through.
It waits while the cows trail slowly across the coulee to hay I just spread.
It waits while smoke begins to rise from the chimney, fire in the woodstove warming my floors.
It waits for that 40-degree temperature swing so it can relax its tension against the cold just as my fingers, toes and muscles relax a bit.
As the thermometer inches higher, I mask up against frostbite to wander the hills of my sanctuary. I sink, delighted, into snow almost to my knees. I admire the vast, untrammeled rangeland, feel it relax even in hibernation.
My soul hears the land’s sighs, feels its acceptance of all that is just as it is, and receives its gift of refuge.