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Inhaling the February Air
8 [With apologies for skipping past January, which is chapter 7 — it will return later]
February in this part of Vermont usually brings exhilaration, with bright sun sparkling on fresh snow. “If you don’t make friends with winter, you’ll have just as much snow but a lot less happiness,” said something online. So even though the bitter cold of January often lingers into the shortest month of the year, I get outside before breakfast for a mile of admiring the surroundings: walking up the back road, warmed by the east exposure of this ridge, watching for good angles to photograph the surroundings.
Just before this winter’s snow settled in, neighbors up the ridge completed construction on a third barn, this time with an apartment upstairs. They call it a barndominium. The two young men renting the apartment don’t seem interested in connecting — their gray car zips off to some workplace before my teeth are brushed, and although I wave if I see them drive past in the afternoon, it seems they don’t see me. Old-person invisibility? I suspect they’ve got the music turned up too high to notice what’s off to the side.
Much more interesting is the tenancy of the barn itself. Just before the snow season got serious, a slender dark-haired woman pulled up with a trailer carrying her horse, along with the first “boarder” she’d accepted, and with a woman friend…
