Come For a Walk With Me

My Northern Lites tag sale snowshoes.

Two years ago I bought a pair of used snowshoes at a tag sale. During last winter's snowless months they languished on their nail on the garage wall. But last week the snow started falling at dusk on Tuesday evening and by Wednesday morning there were 22 inches of light, fluffy snow on the ground. I stepped off my front doorstep and sank in over my knees. Snowshoe time!

Yesterday I joined my brother Frank and three of his neighbors on a trek through a local Audubon Nature Preserve. The site is an old farm on the street where I grew up. I'd wandered these meadows and woods my whole childhood. Frank and I used to strap on my grandfather's old hardwood framed, rawhide laced snowshoes and track each other through some of this very land. I hadn't been on showshoes since I was eight years old. The woods and fields I was about to traverse seemed much the same but this body was far removed from the lithe and limber eight year old I'd been.

At the trail head.

The sun was bright and the wind brisk as we trudged through the first hayfield, past the farm pond, and up into the woods. I remember that pond being dug and the giant turtle that emerged snapping and growling in the dredge's bucket. The land had been mined for limestone in years past and as we climbed, we passed the old stone supports for the cart line that carried the quarried stone downhill to the smelting kiln.

Old quarry cable supports

The woods were deep and still. The only sounds were the creakings of our bindings and the swoosh of snow under our shoes as we made our way through the hardwoods and the sighing pines. The storm had left deep snow on the forest floor and strange snow animals on tree limbs...

Odd little snow animal perched on a broken branch...

I'd brought along my ski poles to help me keep my balance on the uneven ground. I found I didn't need them most of the time but they came in handy when trying to climb over fallen trees or struggle up steep inclines. We stopped occasionally to decipher animal tracks or just to drink in the beauty of the winter landscape. I was eight again in my mind, mittened and capped and completely free in the quiet woods and windblown meadows.

One of several vast, untrammeled meadows.

An hour and a half later we stamped the snow from our shoes in the Preserve parking lot, exclaimed about what a good time we'd had, and made tentative plans to do it again. My shoulders ached from swinging the poles and my back ached from the prolonged tromping but my spirit danced like the happy child that used to roam these spaces daily.