Snow

During the last week I have heard snowplows scraping pavement on more than one occassion. This is not a Sandwich Mountain Farm sound. This is a Tamworth Village sound. While snow plows do pass by the Farm, the packed gravel of the Sandwich Notch Road rings differently, and because the Curious Gourds Studio is farther from the road, it is muted. Our home in the Village is on Main Street, close the road and close to other buildings. The sounds of passing plows are a regular contribution to winter dreams.

When a plow enters my dreams it almost wakes me. In this in-between place sound paints vibrant pictures and sends me along a trail of association. Previous plowings accumulate and layer in memory not so dissimilar from snowfall itself. A scene immediately rises in my mind: I see the plow pushing accumulated snow and headlights driving forward accumulated darkness. Hazard lights spin and spatter red and yellow in the midst of this moving bubble of light. This is what I see from what I hear, but If I crack my eyes I witness red and yellow revolve around my bedroom like frenetic planets, an accelerated celestial show for a sleepy sun. Falling snow obscures the form of this rushing envelop like interference in a poorly received analog television signal — “snow.” As quickly as the plow appears it disappears, and even I who am still curled up in bed and have closed my eyes again can “see” this movement through both increasing and diminishing sound and a very slight change in pitch, a rising and falling as the plow’s iron bow plays a Doppler fiddle tune on the single string of road. My ideal plow is always responding to a storm of some magnitude. In my mind, after the plow has passed, an imaginary morning comes with the world buried in snow. The plow can’t keep up, and while banks on either side of the road grow ever higher, the road itself is never free.

The sound of the plow is a sign, pointing the way to the plow itself. If I look at this semiotically, I need the third element, myself, someone to interpret the sign. And so we have the classic triad suggested by Charles Pierce: the sign (the sound of a plow), the signified (the plow itself), and a signifier (Nat curled up in bed bringing the two together in his mind). However, the relationship is not so simple. A sign can refer to something fictional, like “Hamlet,” just as easily as it might apply to an object in the world. More importantly, the sign may belong to a cascade of associations that go beyond the accumulation of snow.

In my mind a plow signifies more than a flurry. The world must be whited, streets and road buried. It’s like a blanket that warms and calms me because I know I am being embraced and told to stay home: the pressure to drive to work or school disappears and I think of stoking the woodstove, the heart of our home in the winter, itself a sign for comfort and radiating heat. After a storm colors inside become more vibrant in contrast to the bright white of the outside. The outside world initially comes to me through framed windows that are at once passages and barriers — a barrier to bitter cold, a passageway into a soft, white and gray world. Snowshoes in the corner beckon me. While our cats do use the windows during the summer to hop in and out, I use the more traditional threshold, the door, to cross into the outside (though I have been known to climb through a window).

I am outside sinking deeply into the snow even with the snowshoes. I come to the river nearby and see that it has succumbed to the storm and all that is left are little hillocks where rocks sleep beneath the snow. I return home and pass again through the door that presents me with not just a difference of color, texture and temperature, but also of scent. To my inferior nose (compared to Siri), almost all scents are buried while outside after a snowstorm. One exception is the woodsmoke that rises, falls and disperses, some small part making it to my nose. In contrast, inside there is the smell of breakfast cooking: waffles perfumed with vanilla, or maybe a spiced omelet, or potatoes, onions and garlic. Coffee and cocoa mix in, and also the fragrance of woodsmoke, the bit that slipped out while stoking the stove, an indication (sign?) that the inside and outside worlds are not entirely closed to each other.

The pictures go on as long as I doze— notice they are pictures even when they includes scent and sound? Yes, I am still half asleep in bed, though my dream of the perfect storm was so vivid I am not sure it is a dream. Siri licks my face and I pull myself out of bed while it is still dark. No storm, just a few inches of snow.

But that was two days ago. Today I wake at the Sandwich Mountain Farm to a dusting of snow as winter continues to tease us. Pink skies in the morning — sailor’s warning?