Postcard From Hardwick: Cabin Fever Alert
Walking into the Hardwick post office one morning, I laugh at a homemade sign printed on white copier paper taped to the door. Please remove your shoes. Below that, small lettering reads, Just kidding.
February unofficially kicks off the season of Vermont Cabin Fever — the somewhat silly season when winter shows no sign of abating. Ever.
Leaving home one day, I spy a fishercat bounding through the field. The fisher does its odd slink and bounce on the frozen snow, then pauses, its head alert, listening. Midmorning in our neighborhood, most folks have gotten where they need to go — school or work — and for that moment, there seems to be only myself and the wild animal.
I stand there, one hand on my backpack strap, this creature and I staring at each other. The morning is brilliantly sunny, so bright the sun seems as though it should offer some warmth, but the air is cold, cold, on my bare cheeks and fingers.
Standing there, unable to break that shared gaze with this animal, I remember many years ago when a fishercat suddenly darted across a back road I was driving in Elmore. This fisher was the largest one I’d seen, and the animal moved in that strange, nearly serpentine way, its back undulating. The animal’s fur was so black against that green summer day it appeared to absorb color into its fur.
For just a fraction of a moment, the fisher turned its pointed-snout face toward my old blue Volvo — wet onyx eyes, whiskers. In the backseat, my two-year-old daughter exhaled quietly, “Oh.” That was all. Nothing more but that oh.
This is a different animal, on a different day, in a different field.
The creature takes its sweet time, not particularly interested in me dressed in a burgundy down coat. Instead, the animal looks around and then up at the sky, and I follow its gaze, wondering if a crow is flying by. The fisher must see something I can’t, and then, just as silently hurries away, off to its own fisher cat business that day.
In the slow-beating heart of midwinter, there are all these singular moments. A man smoking a cigarette on his back porch, black watchcap pulled low over his forehead. A child nibbling a frozen clot of ice on a mitten. A single chickadee perched on a slender branch of the mock orange bush, its feet holding on for dear life.
And yet — at the same time, our greetings of Good morning and How’s it going? are laced these days with It’s still winter, and Not bad, considering.
The wild weather that isolates us in our homes pulls us together, too.
Come July, that sign on the post office door might stump me. In February, I simply laugh. No way am I slipping off my Sorels and walking through the tracked-in slush. In July, however, I might slide off my sandals, gather those bills from my post office box — maybe a letter if I’m lucky — and then head over to Mackville Pond for a swim. In summer…. But well, that’s a story for another day.
