We walk when I come home from the hardware store in the afternoon, the girls and I.
It is cold because I dress light, only a wool shirt and hat and yellow cotton gloves. You do not feel the cold. You do not feel yourself.
Like that Thanksgiving morning out in the pothole country where there were pheasants when there were pheasants, in the snowstorm where you couldn’t see. Truly, it was a medium wind so it was a snowfall and not a storm except for all the snow that fell.
Along the county road my old man and I jumped the old barbed fence at the shallow, small pond that was frozen over and covered with snow. I was nine and he had his shotgun. So he set himself up on the other side of the small pond 60 yards away and had me drive the tussocks of grass sticking out of the snow, and especially the few cattails, and the willows on the ends along the county road. That was Thanksgiving and there was no traffic on the road, and it was difficult to see us from the road from the snow falling. I roused one rooster for him up out of the cutgrass, but he didn’t get a shot. You didn’t think about the cold, only about how beautiful everything was, and how difficult it was trying to go forward into the deep snow and long, dead grass.
Today we walk North Road for a half-hour. The funny thing I will always remember is that when I’m done going westward or eastward, if I have something to do or need to get back to the outhouse, I turn, and whistle, and the girls are everywhere having fun loving life, Peppy ahead on the road, Foxy far, far ahead, Daphne carrying a road-kill squirrel and stashing it in the tall grass in the ditch, and I whistle and they come to attention and I point my arm high back the other way, and they come back fast and start again, side to side, down the road we’ve just come up. Almost as if they don’t realize the walk – or adventure – is half over, as if they don’t care they’ve already been on all of today’s and last night’s scents, that backtracking is not anything new.
They only care that they are free, and working, and playing, and, I guess, with me.
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