January

The loft is cold as the year turns over. A chilly draft seeps between the gothic windows and their storms, nothing quite fitting right. The peaked ceiling has just a thin layer of insulation between the paint and the cedar shingles, and the whole north end is glass. A chimney runs through the space, its parged sides stingy with the heat within, but some warmth wafts up the stairwell from the wood stove below.

The wood is wet this year. Soggy from a summer of alternating showers and monsoons. Wood that was stacked to dry, piled north-south so the prevailing westerlies would whistle through, instead sagged from so much rain. The fires are slow to start. They sputter and die down, the heat evaporating in the sap.

Mice inhabit the house. A tiny house mouse, fearless, runs along the walls of the kitchen, into the front hall, hides in the toy tractor shed made from a clementine box. A perfect Beatrix Potter house. He is part of a family. I hear them in the walls and the heating ducts, and in the mornings, I find their tripped traps, empty, safe still. My pantry is littered with tiny bits of foil, bitten off the tops of olive oil bottles. They prefer the first press.

Outside all is avian. Woodpeckers — hairy and downy — peck the house if I run out of suet. They suss out cluster flies from under the eaves and attempt to exhume the desiccated corpses trapped between the window panes. Goldfinches and chickadees are the January mainstay. Blue jays intermittently chase them off, then depart in frustration as the feeders shut with their weight.

The barn is quiet in January. Sheep are on maintenance: fed hay in the morning, hay in the evening. That’s all they ask. They are content to munch, ruminate, gestate, and stay outside in the courtyard, despite having access to the barn. Snow covers their backs, but wool traps their body heat. They begin the year placid and calm, undeterred by blizzards or sleet, sensing perhaps that they will be cared for. Fed and watered. Greenwood, the calico barn cat, lies curled like a comma in her straw nest under a feeder. We moved to the farm in January almost fifty years ago.

Young enough to weather the ruin it then was. It was storming as we drove the rented truck with all we owned up the snowy lane. I don’t remember the cold that day. Perhaps the furnace had been installed by then, but I do know there was no duct work yet, nor hot water, nor anything but basic electricity. Excitement and possibility must have kept me warm as we lit the wood-burning cookstove in the primitive nineteenth-century kitchen.