I’ve always loved reading and writing. As a child in school, I filled spiral notebooks with stories and poems and scenes from my imagination. What follows is one of those scenes, an exercise in imagination, an exercise in translating imagination into prose, to create a picture, to make it real. No doubt it’s the snow on the ground now that inspires me to dig it out and share it. Some of the language is a little dated but I’m not changing a word. It is was it is: a scene my mind conjured up long ago, typed on an ancient Woodstock typewriter and stuffed into a dusty box of papers and folders and spiral notebooks, to drift down the years to the present day.
Outside the lodge a cloud of tiny, feathery snowflakes settles slowly over the countryside. Even though night has fallen, the white landscape reflects enough light to enable one to see clearly. A mile to the west a ragged line of evergreens, now colored a spectral white, stretches from the northwest to the south and back toward the northeast in a great curve. On the eastern edge of this curve stands the lodge, nestled beneath tall evergreens at the foot of a long, bare hill. Gusts of wind drive a white plume from the crest of the hill and pile a deep drift against one end of the lodge.
The lodge, a squat, one-story cabin, is constructed of rough-hewn logs and sealed with pitch. So perfectly does it blend with the surrounding hinterlands that it appears to have grown there with the very trees. A curtain is drawn back from one window, permitting a shaft of light to penetrate the darkness without. Snowflakes falling past this window sparkle brightly, but elsewhere are invisible, so that it seemingly snows only in one small spot outside the window.
Though the land outside may be cold and dark, inside the lodge there is warmth and light, and with the sound of laughter and conversation mingles the smell of pine logs and coffee. At one end of a long, high-ceilinged room stands a large fireplace, obviously used for cooking as well as heating. In this a blazing fire crackles and roars as the flames are sucked up the chimney; periodically, a noise resounds like a rifle discharge, accompanied by a burst of sparks which vanishes upward. Waves of heat radiate outward, pushing the cold air into the far corners of the room.
Ranged about the fire in a semi-circle are several couples, their animated faces awash with a wavering orange glow. An air of mirth hovers about them as their discourse carries them far into the night. Finally they are overcome – drugged into sleep – by the warmth of the fire, and one by one each retires to a room in a colder section of the lodge. As the fire dies low the shadows, once content with playing over the far end of the room, creep closer to the hearth. Then, with a final flicker, the light fails, and darkness encompasses the room.
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