Wintersigns
by Sarah Baker Michalak

I wake up kneading my scalp, feel something sharp in the roots and pull out a shiny black seed. It may have been a dream that spawned this, or a memory or wish. By this time each winter I'm feeling peaked and anxious for brighter days.

I plant the seed in a cracked clay pot, set it on the windowsill, pull on creek boots and walk to the creek. Upstream, a fisherman casts a line into the Big Falls pool. Tracks of raccoon and heron wander across the sand and patchy snow. A mixed flock of birds harasses a hawk. The peeling sycamore exposes a dozen shades of gray, a willow weeps.

Last night's cold has extended the shore ice out toward the center, narrowing the sinuous vein of jade water. Now the creek's only way is to wind through the deeper, swifter current. The water's thick and sluggish with cold as it slides around obstructions.

I test the ice beyond the rimy sand, put one foot out and shift my weight. It seems to hold. Concentric freeze lines swerve around some unseen obstacle in ever-widening arcs. In the lee of the bank, rocks and shore debris protrude and lift the ice. It's crusty and crazed and I can't be sure as to what I'm walking on.

Further out the surface becomes glassy and hard. Trapped bulbs of air burble along the edge and pulse with the uneven surge of the current. The ice is a window: exoskeleton of a crayfish; bits of moss, elodea, and eel-grass undulating in the current; rhythmic ripples in the sand.

I inch my way forward toward the edge, spreading out my weight on hands and knees. The ice is thin as skin, scalloped, elaborate as filigree. Petals of ice. I think I hear the ringing of tiny crystal bells.

Near the falls the ice breaks up. The white winter sky illuminates the shards and sharpens as many recesses. A million lights, a million shadows - it looks like it's the dark that gives the light its value. Chill waters chatter over the rocks, a perennial messenger.

Untimely thaw plays tricks on eager spring bulbs. Bright green leaves jumped at the season's false promise, then got caught by the cold and took a nosedive: young, tender roots are flipped up and out of the ground where they dangle, limp and sickening white. I'm caught, too, by these joyless days; the cold puts out the flame.

My day proceeds by fits and starts. I walk to the road and back for the morning paper and fumble with the door, fingers numb with cold. I should plan the week's meals and get to town for groceries. No; first I'll make the order for seeds. I browse through nursery catalogues and try to get interested.

The T'ang Dynasty poet Han-shan left the frustrations of his life behind and lived as a recluse and poet in the T'ien-t'ai Mountains along China's seacoast. I read

Once at Cold Mountain, troubles cease -
No more tangled, hung-up mind.
I idly scribble poems on the rock cliff,
Taking whatever comes, like a drifting boat. (Snyder 27)

When times are hard I sometimes lose the faith in nature's writing poetry all over itself. The doubt, the chaos, the thought of that blank slate weighs heavy. Did Han-shan ever find his way into my own valley on some starless winter night and leave some words behind? The notion's enough to get me up and out and looking.

The old hemlock stands alone, shoulders heavy with snow. A few birds squabble at the feeder; a crow swoops and plucks up a mouse from the surface of the snow. Bitter cold drives the crippled opossum out of the woods to scavenge for the last of the food we put out for the cats. Lifeless stalks of bee balm and coneflower madly tic-tock in the wind.

The blizzard has obliterated the path. I make my own way across the field. In the woods the snow is crisscrossed with a myriad of tracks and marks: a short trail between entry and exit holes, heavy traffic between walnut trees, droppings under the tracery of branches overhead. Near the base of a tree, the snow darkens with snow fleas. A trail of footprints ends abruptly between the faint depressions of wing marks. A spot of blood, dark red on bright white.

Along the top of the creek bank, deer tracks look like split hearts. Their trail leads to the crossing where the creek's ice will be thick enough for my weight, too. Paths from every direction run helter-skelter across the ice and tend to point downstream, converging at a hole kept open by the current.

Frozen concentric and irregular ridges circle the opening where the water has overflowed its perimeter. In the center: a quivering black pool, water thick with cold.

I follow the bank through thickets of honeysuckle and Japanese knotweed until the ground begins to soften at the edge of the seep. Patches of wet green growth and dark ooze break up the snowy sea of white. Hundreds of hooded plants rise out of the muck: skunk cabbage. I get down to look closely at one: inside the narrow opening the knobby base is covered with clusters of blossoms. Tiny, buzzing flies madly work the inflorescence. The air around the plant is slightly warm. I cup my ungloved hands closely around it, drawn in by the heat.

What's the force behind these feisty plants' birth in the least hospitable of seasons? The thought stirs me up; that same force bends and blurs the boundaries between nature and us, and between inner and outer nature. Han-shan writes The path to Han-shan's is laughable,

A path, but no sign of cart or horse.
Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists
Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged.
A thousand grasses bend with dew,
A hill of pines hums in the wind.
And now I've lost the shortcut home,
Body asking shadow, how do you keep up? (Snyder 23)

A field of skunk cabbage and the whole phenomenal world manifests itself in us.

A blizzard smothers the porch furniture; the otherwise familiar chairs emerge exaggerated and buffoon-like. I go out to replenish the feeder. Chicadees punctuate the scene with their quick, bright flight and sweet buzzing. Juncos flock on the ground and dig holes by thrusting their tiny bodies forward and down to flick away the snow for buried seeds. Cold frames, garden path, wood pile: what were the major features and focal points are just dimples now in a featurless white sea.

My sense of the place is obliterated.

The neighbor shows up at the back door, a little panicky about unplowed roads, the eerie quiet and the mail being late. I walk her home. On the way back a cardinal's cry pierces the hush: does he know fear? By what measure? I doubt birds dream, or need to: their time is short and blessed by lives untouched with privilege or the vulnerability of peace. Cardinal flits among tenacious seed sprays of spent Queen Anne's lace, blooming again with frosty white halos. Every fine detail is embellished - bud, leaf scar, peeling edge of old bark - shining with icy light. Cobwebs that hang from the windowsill are spangled with tiny balls of snow: strings of pearls. Woodpecker pounds and probes locust trunk for slumbering larvae.

I am thinking about nature's wise coping with what to us is paucity. In winter the insects that may seem only to be resting may be undergoing astonishing metamorphoses. Other creatures may already be busy with next year's brood: the mallards begin their courtships as early as November, the great horned owls in December. The growing things find advantage in whatever the season offers.

Insects, I read, build winter resilience by manufacturing internal antifreeze. Microtus pennsylvanicus, the field mouse, is not only active but continues to reproduce through the harshest of months, in spherical subnivian nests. She may raise a litter every month, each with up to a dozen babies.

Though I see little of them, I know that field mice are out and about in winter. I've identified their tiny footprints that beat the trail on a low, snowy branch of the apple tree. I think they're living in an old bird's nest. Occasionally, out of the corner of my eye I see something small, dark and furry make a mad dash and disappear under cover. And I've learned that those humped tunnels that vein the meadow are the winter passageways of Microtus.

The cats and I go for a walk. In the field where the sun compacts the snow and tips of new grass poke up through it, the Microtus runways protrude and are still intact. There are dozens of them - it's a busy place. I try to see if there's a plan or a pattern.

Toward the center of the field, I carefully unroof one of the tunnels and follow it to a point at which it crosses another. The path is paved with their tracks. I come across a neat pile of grass clippings and, a little further on, scat at the intersection.

One of the cats stands at attention a few feet from me, motionless, trembling in what I guess is anticipation. At some sign he leaps abruptly, pounces, and comes up with a mouse.

Did the tiny creature make some sound, going about its business?

Did it squeak?

The subtlest of natures' ruminations leaves me out. Most of Microtus' active life takes place at night or under cover. This time I console myself with what I can learn from a diverse collection of natural history books. I find out that field mice have a dark side: a cannibalistic tendency has been observed, as they've consumed their own young. But I also read that they're good swimmers - a trait that I may have a slightly better chance to observe, on a hot summer night. And some field mice possess a recessive gene that allows them to dance: they've been observed spinning and swinging, the movements bearing an uncanny resemblance to waltzing.

Mice waltzing over the drifts! I try to imagine the extent of nature's finessing to accommodate and find possibility in winter - adaptation's ageless dance with the valley's seasonal life.

Old black cherry is clothed in icy sheets; its cackling in a least breeze has me thinking about aerial answers. Chipmunk's insouciant barking and chucking dismisses the idea: winterwit. Working an old shriveled drupe, she flicks a shell, leaps down and adds her prints to the trails that crazy-quilt the snow: wintersigns in white writing, stitching together frigid light with blue shadow.

They lead to the creek.

Motion's been stilled by last night's subzero temperatures. The minor currents are sluggish, interbraided with the open stream that burbles along the rough edges, chuckling at sleep's tide and the dull hours. The waters duck in and out, taking little airy gulps to the life that finds its home in those frigid depths.

4. I can't shake the temptation to play with the paradox of Hanshan's pilgrimage and where it is, exactly, that he finds his heart's home.

My home was at Cold Mountain from the start,
Rambling among the hills, far from trouble.
Gone, and a million things leave no trace
Loosed, and it flows through the galaxies
A fountain of light, into the very mind -
Not a thing, and yet it appears before me:
Now I know the pearl of the Buddha-nature
Know its use: a boundless perfect sphere. (Snyder 28)

The garden slumbers now, deep in that airless, lightless place of beginning. Roots' respiration melts the snow and makes holes that look like black eyes blinking from a blind white world.

A Carolina wren roosts on the sill over my front door for a week now, drawn, I guess, by the eaves' protection and what little warmth the window may offer. Petite body hunkered down and pulled in against the cold, her fluffed up feathers camouflage a mottled breast and dark-barred belly and back.

When I get too close she reforms herself and assumes a feisty stance: tail raised, beak upturned, eyes flashing. Her family name is Troglodytidae - "cave dweller." And right now her perch resembles a cave: snow drifts down over the eaves and hangs precariously, a stratified wall that stops just short of the wrinkled drift whipping up from the ground. The narrow slit still open between the two serves as her entryway. The shed thermometer reads16 degrees below zero Fahrenheit! How can this tiny being possibly deal with the temperature stress? I shiver and pull my robe closer, feeling a little ill equipped.

Wren's days are a mystery to me. She appears by five or six o'clock each evening and is gone by morning's light. The routine suggests a larger, largely unseen rhythm. Is she scratching around for tidbits in the woodland underbrush? Or perhaps she's high in the branches overhead, above it all. An ancient fable describes the world's birds deciding to choose a leader by observing the one who flies the highest. A competition ensues. Eagle soars above all the rest. He is about to be acclaimed king when a flurry of song bursts from his back: it's a wren that has hidden itself under eagle's feathers. Having risen this far with no effort and still spunky, wren flies higher still and wins the crown.

The Cherokees considered the wren a busybody who tattled on everybody and their business. On my way to bed I can see the corner of one tiny, dark eye; I'm careful to cover up before the lights are out. My wren darts off the sill as I come by, flies deftly between the drifts and flits in and out of shadow. I lose sight of her in the forest edge among the wind-whipped snow's spooky apparitions. She's at home among those penumbras of the rising and falling world, and in winter's sting that sets it all in motion.

Little is known of Chuang Tzu, a Taoist sage of the 4th century B.C. He left one slim volume of writing behind, an eclectic mix of provocative, insightful works. I cruise the web, enter a search for "inner and outer nature," and come up with Patricia Ebrey's translation.

As Chuang Tzu neared death, he dismissed his disciples' desire to prepare an elaborate tomb for him. ''I have the sky and the earth for inner and outer coffins, the sun and the moon for jade disks, the stars for pearls and the ten thousand things for farewell gifts. Isn't the paraphernalia for my burial adequate without adding anything?" ''We are afraid the crows and kites will eat you, master," a disciple said.

"Above ground, I will be eaten by crows and kites; below ground by ants. You are robbing from the one to give to the other. Why play favorites?"

I hear his disregard for convention and ritual as sovereignty from the traps of either heaven or earth.

Clouds doze in the east, reluctant lids. The sun tries to pry an opening but can't quite manage anything more than a hazy gray. The dull dawn doesn't seem to matter - right now the air in the seedling room is bright with persuasion, and the sprouts turn toward the refulgence. The shoots glow, transfused, no more than fragile columns of watery light. The seedlings grow densely with the first true leaves and need to be thinned; I take pairs of seed leaves between thumb and forefinger and give a gentle tug. Plucky! They resist a little and then let go, roots nearly nothing, tiny clumps of soil dangling. Where's the muscle?

Outdoors, the seedflats are pulled from their subterranean wintering places in the coldframes and snuggled into the gravel bed against the south wall. I'm counting on prevernal warmth and light to coax life from the soil's safety. The flats are draped with bubble wrap and a thin layer of dry leaves to ease the transition.

I've heard that the ice dam on Beaver Creek has burst, and I walk to the point at which this secondary enters the main stream to see what's been flushed down from the hills. Rosa mulitflora's crimson buds swell from thorny green canes; spiky shoots of daylily and wild onion punctuate the season's drab garb. Mounds of phlox poke up through pockets of snow, bearing roofs of matted leaves lanced by the plants' early growth.

The waters' timbre deepens just upstream from the intersection of the two creeks and the air is a little musky with the zing of the season's new green life bubbling in from the tributary. Jeweled waters wink with chips of ice running across the gravel bar - the light that was sucked up by last autumn's shadowy stream now trips all over itself, giddy at being poured back out.

The water darkens, though, at the offshore place where the inflowing waters of the tributary meet the main trunk of the stream. Close to the center, the surface begins to swell: a sharpedged wave rises and holds the form, appearing to be stationary.

The eerie crest fluctuates on either side of an axis, a long supple spine of near-still points, and then collapses. It's as if the body of the world is engaged with its spirit in some confounding, miraculous complicity. I stand transfixed, feet mired on the muddy border.

Midday: struggling to shed the grief that went to bed with me last night: the suicide of a loved one. I'm scared, shattered, lost somewhere between this world and another.

The people I've loved: a constellation. Its value derived from each one's light, all of them, together, an immense picture I count on to light up my world. And, yes, nearly cosmic in the way it has guided me. One star falls and all the lights of those remaining change. How does the constellation rearrange itself? What does it become?

I wrap myself up in a heavy blanket and sit outside. That phone call she had made to me weeks before haunts me: "I don't think I'm going to make it..." Eyes grope black cherry's leathery, fissured bark, the razor-sharp edge it cuts against garish light; descend the lumpy, scarred trunk to dark humus and bland bedrock. These things: a cryptic language I strain to read as consolation for immense loss. It keeps me on the brink's upside, but just.

She saw wonders. Lover of nature, deep into the Native American culture here that finds sustenance in earth's wisdom. But she just couldn't hold on. Why? It's agonizing to ponder.

An Elder on the Reservation near here had offered the teachings to her a few years back. She was a keen student, and, in turn, shared some of the wisdom she had gained with the rest of us in a ceremony honoring the winter solstice.

The ceremony began with each of us making an offering in the circle's center. She brought a handful of winter-dried grasses, spare and beautiful remains of the flower heads intact. She spoke briefly, eloquently about the season passed, the season to come, the great mystery. We all took our turn. After the ceremony she handed me a book. In it was the Elder's telling of the creation story and the seven worlds of time.

We and all of life, it tells, come and go throughout a succession of worlds, each world offering us opportunity to develop aspects of character. Creation begins to unfold in The First World of Love: the people who fail its lesson are destroyed in fire. The survivors enter the Second World of Ice. Antelope helps them to develop the gifts they'll need to endure the barren surface of frozen tundra: by eating his body they acquire his instincts; with his sinew and tendons they make clothing and shelter; his bones and horns provide material for tools. The few patches of fertile soil increase, healing herbs and vegetable foods multiply. For some people, the success is corrupting: they become self-centered and envious. As the Second World comes to an end it takes them with it. The few who have nurtured humility and gratitude are shown the way to safety, and take with them a single flower - the Black Arctic Flower- that holds the last of the distant sun's light and warmth. It starts the ice mountains' melting, and marks the coming of the Third World of Water. One great landmass - Turtle Island - is at its center. The tree of life has survived the changes of the previous worlds and stands in the middle of the island; seeds of every vegetable and flower hang from its branches. This is the beginning of the world as we know it.

Now I try to hold the story in my heart, read between the lines, but only spin in dualities. Beginnings, endings. Destruction, rebirth. She's gone. Or is she? The temperature drops. Deafening quiet. Blue air. The moan of a dove. Icy rain gives way to fine snow that writes white on the scene. Some light lasts in the dark: her legacy? Wispy hoarfrost sprints sideways across woody arabesques, ascends the trunk and disappears.

A howl rises from my lung's belly and the great ear of the storied valley opens and accepts it. The sound thrashes the gorge walls, resounding and resounding, until it finally fades away.

Upvalley, the icecap groans and threatens like vague thunder. Chuang Tzu did not weep at his own wife's death. He tells us this: "Before she was born, in the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born.

Now there's been another change and she's dead. She'll lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and screaming, it would show that I don't understand anything about fate." (Chuang-tzu 113) He goes so far as to advise that we ought not to avoid chaos and doubt, but draw on them as the torches to steer by. I try to make my mind squint: chaos and doubt as beacons?

Hardship is sure, and tangled inextricably with the real worth of the season. This place spawns a trust in ways that I can't name, and my actions in it are enactments, or inquiries, of faith. The questions go unanswered. But the substance of late winter's dawns and dusks, of water's transience and of the soil's tilth, offer some reply. " In all of the thirty-seven years that I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being here as I am," Wendell Berry says of living and farming in his native Kentucky along the Kentucky River. "I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And then is when.

I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving." (Berry 30) It's here, in my native place, that the most difficult questions pose themselves, and here, too, that the opportunity for meaningful effort and deepest reward dwell.

Work to do. I plant seeds of Asclepias and Gaillardia with the others in the south window to develop and be ready for the meadow planting by late summer. Oh, the flowering meadow: it seems a world away. Now huge flakes choke the air; the walnut tree's furrowed bark is etched with ghostly precision. A few dry leaves rattle. The field's wind-whipped blades of old grass spin and clear near-perfect one-inch circles in the snow.

There are reasons for optimism. Tree trunk weeps with snow melt and smells faintly sweet as it mixes with sap, washing away the nagging melancholy. Gurgling water is audible under the cliff drifts. Wild turkeys saunter up the bank from the creek and forage on rose hips, a step or two of from the path. The air circulates with a new presence - something I can't name. The birds sing with new immediacy. Flowers of slippery elm blush in the pallid sky and the willow's furry buds swell. Minute leaf bouquets burst from the dry branches of honeysuckle. If I squint,

I can see a trace of green growth bucking tiny snowdrifts in the seedbeds. The furtive soil knows things that we don't know. Oblique needles of pink light flood the woods. Late-winter garden work fills the better part of an afternoon: the autumn mulch is lifted, remains of last year's stalks trimmed, plants repositioned that have been heaved out by the frost. The lobelia rosettes and the woody crowns of asters and phlox are crowded and need dividing, but the mud puts the job off for now.

In a few weeks' time the seedlings will be ready for transplant; I wash and sterilize pots for the remainder of the day. It's a little chilly for it, but the south side offers enough warmth and light to make the work tolerable. My hands emerge from the tub red and throbbing, but it feels good to be working with the grain of things.