Everything is different this morning. Ground that squelched and squished yesterday is hard and crunchy. Piles of fallen leaves have turned into diamond mines, sparkling in the unfamiliar sun. The first real freeze is here, and that changes everything.
In the city, life continues on despite the seasons. If it’s cold, you just turn up the heat or walk a little faster from your car to your office. If it snows in Vancouver, everyone make jokes about how two inches of the white stuff grinds the city to a halt, as if it’s silly and abnormal to pay attention to what is going on in the living world.
The idea of being constrained by natural limits is a punchline, not an imperative. The means to push through those limits, whether it means more gas for the furnace, salt trucks for the roads or whatever else is needed to carry on, as if nothing has changed, will just magically appear from somewhere.
But out here in the country, we have to live within our means. All that firewood we split and stacked in the summer is precious now, and so is every carrot and potato in the cold room.
Outside projects not completed before today do not get done until spring. It will probably not stay hard frozen all winter, maybe we’ll have a few brief reprieves here and there, but for the most part it’s inside time now. Just as it always does, winter wins this round.
Many people see this as an argument against country living, as if the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want to, is something to be sought after.
We are taught to think of that as freedom, to view a life lived within natural limits as an anachronism to be eradicated.
I don’t have to figure out how to get to a job today, or consider what I’ll do tomorrow morning if it snows (it probably will) and they don’t plough my road (they won’t).
I have everything I need right here, because I have lived the rest of the year with the knowledge that this morning would come. I have let the natural limits of the land, climate and seasons be the framework I live in, so I don’t have to argue with them.
I can put on my coat and boots, if I want, and take the dogs for a romp over the frozen bluffs while the sun is shining. I can sit by the fire and watch the frost sparkle all day and do the same tomorrow or the next day when the snow starts falling. And when it melts in the spring, which it will, I’ll be ready to pick up my tools and start again.
So, tell me, who is the one with the freedom?
