It’s a pretty, little storm. Nothing like what we might have had, but it’s not over. It’s the kind of storm where the snow sticks to every branch, where the woodland becomes quiet, magical, dangerous. This snow signals the end of all that other stuff -- the hustle, the heat, the green. The world is grey, now, and white and silver and cold.

The snow covered branches reveal the old woods road. The road is just a path. It has seen no improvements, no gravel, just keeping it clear of downed branches, storm-topped trees. It was the original way in from the state highway. Its age is not known. The land was logged the middle of the last century. The loggers took out all the chestnut. Maybe they were dead. In our youth, the decaying chestnut tops lay about the woods like the rib bones of whale carcasses. The ribs have since disappeared, the large stumps gone. This was called Chestnut Hill. The road travels along the ridge of the low hill. The chestnuts and white oaks grew on the ridge, and the red swamp maples and pin oaks grew in the wet areas off the side of the hill. After the chestnuts, hornbeam occupied the new patches of sunlight.

When we were boys, we hiked in here and camped and made campfires and got to know the land, and we imagined the Indians before us and their hunting camps and where they would have stalked their prey or made a fire. We walked this road with our father and here we learned how to hunt squirrel and use a 22 short.

And before that, when my father was a boy, they came in here with a team of horses and a stone bolt, or sled, and brought out logs to take back to the farmhouse to split up for their mother’s kitchen woodstove. I knew Gram well, as she lived to be 98, but I never saw her old, black kitchen stove, only a picture, and I can’t really imagine what it must have been like in her big farmhouse kitchen with her three boys and husband. But I do know, back then, everyone knew how to play Pinochle!

When some of the farm was split off and the woods came to me, I still had to cross my brother’s land to get to the woods road from the highway. The woods road was my connection to my project. Crossing my brother’s land was guaranteed by the agreement, but it took me longer to build my new driveway --abandoning the woods road -- than it should have, and, well, you know how that can be.

Now the old road is no longer used as a driveway. It is the domain of the cross-country skiers, and walkers, and the dog Darcy loves to run along it after the deer. I use it for my own firewood production and I keep it open. The road always had a soft, sweeping feel to it, intimate and organic. And sometimes, in a storm like this, with a little free time, I can look down the road, framed in white branches, and look off along it, deep into the woods, and go into a trance, like a bird.