All Dressed in White

The arctic deepfreeze finally let up here at the Row, and we’ve been getting out & about in the balmy 20- or 30-degree days, inching our way back to normal. There are mountains of snow everywhere, with ribbons carved out of gravel roads and county highways just wide enough for cars to pass. School started last Wednesday, and driving into Little Town in the early morning is like crossing the tundra. The scene is breathtaking in its stark black & white contrast, with vast empty pasture & fields blown into oceanscapes of snow tides frozen mid-wave. Dense overnight fog gives us mornings flocked in fuzzy white hoarfrost, quite a spectacle if you’ve never seen it. A couple of mornings, as if it all wasn’t stunning enough, I drove to town in heavy swirling fog; I’m pretty sure Merlin was thumbing a ride on the Greenfield Road.

The recent deepfreeze forced us to conjure prairie ingenuity and took me back to my 70’s Earth Mother roots. I made oat bread and parmesan-caper bread, thick Greek-style yogurt, and a splendid granola with 5 grains and 5 kinds of dried fruit. When Mom and I were in the Yucatan last summer, the pretty Italian boys who ran Posada Margherita in Tulum served us breakfasts of Greek yogurt topped with homemade granola and fresh fruit. So Ray and I have been living lately on yogurt, granola and blueberries for breakfast, and hearty soups and parmie caper bread for dinner. Wonderful, though quite different from breakfast under a thatched palapa with the Caribbean surf as a backdrop.

Winter tragedy found its way to the Row yesterday. Returning home from a day of shopping in Sioux City, Ray and I were stopped on our road by two hunters in a pickup, letting us know that “someone” had run over three of our peacocks just in front of our house. Maybe these two hunters were the culprits, we’ll never know, but we do know the peas have gotten far too comfortable with traffic. The snow is so deep here that the peas spend a lot of time walking single-file up and down the plowed drive and road—the only open spaces they can navigate right now—and they like to spend sunny afternoons on the narrow plowed road, scratching for gravel and spilled corn. They recognize my van, Mini Pearl, and are often reluctant to budge when I drive in or out of the yard. So it wasn’t surprising that someone barreling down our road might have come suddenly on too-tame, stubborn peacocks, but it was very sad to see the carnage. And now we are 17. This is probably still enough peacocks to qualify me as a Crazy Peacock Woman (one peahen, desperate last week to beat her flockmates to the corn bucket, actually flew up and tried to land on my head), but we’ll have to do some serious horn-honking, shrieking, get-out-of-way-NOW car conditioning lest we lose more of our flock before thaws open up the safer yard and pastures for the peas. It’ll thaw one day, right?