Something in January brings out the pilgrim spirit in me. In my bookended house I walk from window to window and start itching so much I start to think I’ve come down with athlete’s foot. I feel myself rife with the most unaccountable yearnings. I think, how I have never been to Cleveland! How dearly I would love to meet someone named Ethel! Consider: I am decidedly middle-aged and muddle-aged and have never wandered over the countryside free of thoughts of the future, I haven’t even ridden a horse, or tipped a cow. Sundry plans burble in my head, against the cold, against the snow, against the untimely dusk, even as I fear all my dreams will melt away with the snow in the spring. I feel a pall coming over me and fear I’m becoming a parable of a life deferred.
It’s early January and the high holy days of the shopping—not to say religious—calendar have passed. It’s bleak out there and the books aren’t selling and my inbox isn’t filling so I head across town to the thrift store.
The roads are salty-white but clear for riding.
I don’t bother to look at the books (I’ve enough unwanted tomes in my orphanage) but instead I head for the sporting goods department, where I try out all the tennis rackets. For snowshoes. I find two rackets with wooden frames and lace them up on my feet easily enough, then clog my way over to the checkout counter.
Back home, I walk half a mile through the pine woods behind my house, leaving a trail of tennis racket prints in my wake, up to the bald patch at the top of the hill. It’s a nice spot. I’m still in the city limits and can hear trivial whines of police and fire sirens, but gazing east I see only rural white hills rolling, hills hitched together without end, hills that gently thicken and deepen and at last become the Catskills fifty miles thither. I love to look on the rolling folds of land, though they do make me a little seasick. I try to catch the foggy nexus where one hill fades into the next behind it, and imagine myself riding my bicycle across them, riding away into the sunrise.
It’s a good place to welcome winter.
