The snow’s falling, purposefully and perfectly, landing softly, unhurt and in piles.
I drive through the woods. Old, knotty arms rise and part, and under arches of white, I’m cheered towards home and the end of a long afternoon of errands and town.
I’m almost up over the gravel knoll, right there where we planted the Norway Spruce when Shalom was born, just before the entrance to our gravel lane and its palisade of red maples, when I glance over at Martin’s woods and see it leaning. Leaning like Pisa. I have to turn up our lane, and I do, but I turn my head to catch a view of it again from this angle, to make sure, confirm.
I find him in the study, farm hands working on farm bills. I drop my bags on the counter and move to the study window.
“Did you see it? Do you think it may really go?”
Farmer Husband looks up from his own piles of white, papers and envelopes.
“What go?”
“The shack in Martin’s bush. It’s got a pronounced lean. More like a sagging slump. Do you think it might go?”
He pushes his chair back, rolling pen in his grease-grooved fingers. His eyes search for shanty shouldered in amongst the trees.
“See?” My pitch’s too high and I’m pointing.
He nods in that slow, calm way of his.
“Well, that snow’s awful heavy.” He stands, walks to the window for a better line of sight. “You heard about those barn roofs that collapsed in Lambton County a few weeks back?” I hadn’t.
“All it takes is 25-centimetre of snow on the roof of an 1800 sq ft building and it’s the weight of a full size elephant laying up there on your roof.” He nods towards the woods. “That shack can’t take that.”
“But it can’t go!” I lean against him, eyes still fixed on the slanting hovel. “I need it. Every morning I sit in the study and look out across the fields and there it stands, a companion rising with me and the dawn. Like a shy and quiet someone’s just over there in the woods, thinking about this business of living too.”
I turn to look into his eyes, so he comprehends the gravity of it all. “Like Thoreau’s over there, contemplating and scratching it down.”
The smile begins first in his eyes.
“Ann!” He grabs me round the waist, shaking his head with laughter. “You thought it was an eyesore when they dragged it back here!”
I pull back but he’s got me and I’m laughing too.
“I did? I didn’t!”
He’s nodding, eyes chuckling. I can feel his laughter, us pressed close like this.
“You ranted and raved…” He grins. “Remember? Why they’d drag it back to the bush? Why not just burn it if they didn’t want it?”
I blush, stammer. “Well…. that was all before…. before I saw the world artfully!”
Have I changed that much?
I feel foolish and it feels good to laugh.
He pulls me in tighter. “Perspective, huh?”
Nuzzling into his shoulder, I whisper, “Yeah… just a change of perspective.”
The world’s become art, signed with His name, work of the Artist who can’t stop chiseling the ugly into sculpted beauty.
His work begins with these eyes.
Lord, open the eyes of my heart to see the Beauty of You in all things.
Related: The Ugly Beautiful
Photos: full moon setting in morning’s first light, over the shack across the fields here
