All:A Winter Classic

 I hope Mrs. Morrison made you all read John Greenleaf Whittier's "Snowbound" last year.
What??  You didn't, or you just don't remember?

Well, it's all about a real New England nor'easter (one with snow, I mean, not sleet) remembered from boyhood.  The storm starts around sunset, goes all though the next day and night.  On the following morning, it's time to dig out.

A prompt, decisive man, no breath
Our father wasted: "Boys, a path!"
Well pleased (for when did farmer boy
Count such a summons less than joy?)
Our buskins on our feet we drew;
With mittened hands, and caps drawn low,
To guard our necks and ears from snow,
We cut the solid whiteness through.

The snow is so deep that they have to dig a tunnel through it on their way to the barn to tend to the animals.  But still there's time for fun, too.

And, where the drift was deepest, made
A tunnel walled and overlaid
With dazzling crystal: we had read
Of rare Aladdin's wondrous cave,
And to our own his name we gave,
With many a wish the luck were ours
To test his lamp's supernal powers.

(Remember all the fun you used to have as a kid playing in the snow, them coming inside to hot chocolate and grapefruit!)

That night, the family gathers by the fireside (in the children's rooms snow is blowing in between the clapboards).  To pass the time, they talk.  To each other!  They begin to tell stories.  Father, of course, goes first telling about sitting "down again to moose and samp/In trapper's hut and Indian camp" up on Lake Memphremagog when he was a young man.

Mother goes next, with some family history of

how the Indian hordes came down
At midnight on Concheco town,
And how her own great-uncle bore
His cruel scalp-mark to fourscore.

Whittier's uncle was there, a "simple" man who never travelled more than twenty miles from home in his life, but who knew as well as any man the natural world in his own backyard.  A maiden aunt, a sweet woman who never found a man to marry her, was there, as well as the local schoolmaster.  (In lieu of paying taxes, a family could offer to board the school teacher.

Brisk wielder of the birch and rule,
The master of the local school
Held at the fire his favored place,
Its warm glow lit a laughing face
Fresh-hued and fair, where scarce appeared
The uncertain prophecy of beard.
He teased the mitten-blinded cat,
Played cross-pins on my uncle's hat,
Sang songs, and told us what befalls
In classic Dartmouth's college halls.

There was another visitor there, too, a strange, exotic woman who cast a strong spell over the young Whittier.

Another guest that winter night
Flashed back from lustrous eyes the light.
Unmarked by time, and yet not young,
The honeyed music of her tongue
And words of meekness scarcely told
A nature passionate and bold. . .
She sat among us, at the test,
A not unfeared, half-welcome guest,
Rebuking with her cultured phrase
Our homeliness of words and ways. . . 
A woman tropical, intense
In thought and act, in soul and sense,
She blended in a like degree
The vixen and the devotee,
Revealing with each freak of feint
The temper of Petruchio's Kate,
The raptures of Siena's saint.

And, of course, in any nostalgic look back at the past, we're likely to feel the presence of the mortality paradox.

Gathered around the fire that night were two of Whittier's sisters.  The older,

A full, rich nature, free to trust,
Truthful and almost sternly just,
Impulsive, earnest, prompt to act,
And make her generous thought a fact,
Keeping with many a light disguise
The secret of self-sacrifice. . .
How many a poor one's blessing went
With thee beneath the low green tent
Whose curtain never outward swings!

And the younger

Lifting her large, sweet, asking eyes,
Now bathed in the unfading green
And holy peace of Paradise.
Oh, looking from some heavenly hill,
Or from the shade of saintly palms,
Or silver reach of river calms,
Do those large eyes behold me still?

It's only in his memories that Whittier can see them now, as well as most of those people around the fire that night.

I have logs already to go in my faireplace.  After lunch I will set them ablaze, and I'll be sitting around spending a stolen afternoon with my wife and my son (and missing my older boy, already away from home at college).

Enjoy your day off, class.  Try to enjoy every day.