TIME BOUND:

When Winter Comes (VERLYN KLINKENBORG, 12/17/04, NY Times)

No matter how unprepared I am, I always imagine preparing for a winter you can't muddle through. It's a deep, wooded season. Time pauses and then pauses again. The sun winks over the horizon, glinting on a snow-swept lake - just enough light to wake the chickadees.

The eaves are low all around the house that this winter comes to, and I've surrounded the entire house with cordwood, leaving gaps for the windows and doors. Winter will go nowhere until I've burned through it all.

I have no plans except to rake the snow off the roof after the next big blizzard, and carry out the ashes from the woodstove, and read everything I've ever meant to read.

Of course, a daydream like this isn't really about winter or snow or firewood or even the feeling of having prepared every last thing that needs preparing. It's about something far more elemental, the time that moves through us day by day. It's an old human hope - to have a consciousness separate from the consciousness of time. But it's always a vain hope.

I'll never get that much cordwood stacked, and never need to. Winter comes and goes in the same breath, condensing right before your face on a day when the temperature never gets up to 20 degrees.