Pages of wood and sheets of snow

It is sleeting outside and the winds are fierce. There is white on the ground though I hesitate to call it snow. I am sure the daffodils that were considering budding out have now turned to an icy mush. It is profoundly cold in the house though the thermostat is, as always, at 50-ish. I have been sitting beside the wood stove which is the only way to stay warm. There is an odd clock-like ticking sound and the occasional pounding that sounds like someone in work boots coming to the porch door. It is the snow and ice sheeting off the roof.

Spring.

H is on his way. It is more than a little nuts since he will have to leave late tomorrow or very early Sunday to make a noon plane, but he is determined to spend the next 24 hours here. And I am frankly grateful. There are days when we can get by well enough living separately, and given all the years I was a "single",  I actually relish my solitude, but there are some times that are harder than others, and I miss having him nearby, working at the dining room table while I work in the writing nook or outside. It has been a very social week, and I frankly should be fine with a weekend left to my own devices, but I am glad he is coming.

There is a black cherry log in the wood stove, and I am noticing for the first time, that it burns in rectangular flakes, like a string of Tibetan prayer flags, or tiny pages from a handmade book. The pages are ember orange and the edges are shroud grey. I am wondering whether other wood burns differently than cherry which has a curled page-like bark. I am wondering whether there is a link between the way the pages of wood drop from their book onto the floor of the stove, and the way the fire generates warmth. 

I can hear the fire house whistle and it isn’t noon, That means somebody needs help. Odd what you know in a small town. It was only one blast, so it isn't a house fire. Somebody is probably off the road or has a chimney fire. Today would be a tough day to be helpful. The wives of the firefighters will be preparing food for afterward, while the men and one woman who make up our volunteer squad try to stay vertical. The woman fire fighter is a new addition, having arrived from Arizona last November. She built a tiny house on 56 acres and plans to grow blueberries, buckwheat, mushrooms and baby ginger. I told her about the dangers of a roadside weed known as poison parsnip and our friend Derrick says he hopes she knows that some varieties of baby ginger are illegal here.

She knows something about technology from her previous life in San Francisco and will be teaching a class in blogging and web site development in a few weeks. Nice that she is already volunteering for both the fire company and the library and she hasn't even been here a year.

She sent me an email this morning saying that two people had come by to see her and she suspected that I had sent them. She thanked me for weaving her into the community. I suspect that they were responding to my comment about her history as a rock climber. One probably invited her to do some recreational climbing and the other to use her skills to prune trees. A hard worker is always welcome. They will teach her what they know about farming and about the trails up the hills around here and she will teach them what she knows about using fermentation to make food. Someone has already plowed her driveway without asking for payment or identifying himself (or herself). 

So she's teaching technology, and someone else is teaching landscape lessons. And someone else is teaching neighborliness. 

I am struck (again) by something I always knew. Communities have a kind of collective brain, a common knowledge that is shared by their members. And each community has different knoweldge than its neighbors because it has different residents with different skills. And each time someone moves in, the community gets smarter. And each time someone leaves or dies, we become duller; there is a real loss to the collective.  

It isn't so obvious in bigger places, but here we know that Scooter can fix any engine ever made, and Lois and Winsome and Kathy and Aleda can identify and nurture any plant in any garden. And if someone needs a well drilled, the Parkers who live down the street, have drilled so many wells around here that they know what's underground even without looking at your land. And Joey who taps our trees is second or third-generation-smart about how to put in the taps under a branch and how to put wood blocks on the trunks where the winch would sit, to keep from girdling the trees and killing them prematurely. Ed has taught me about predicting weather from the direction of the wind and the underside of the leaves, and about making honey,  and about the relationship between water temperature and the taste of fish in the stream. And I know where the wild ramps are, and the fiddleheads, and now I know where the deer and the ticks are likely to be densest on our land.

I have often thought that what mattered to me was "community" in some abstract way, when I think that what I really wanted was to know what my neighbors had to teach. A good community is one that makes everyone smarter; a struggling community privatizes wisdom, charges for its sharing, divides those who know from those who don't. A good community is one that takes the time to teach; a challenged community is one that doesn't have "enough" time. 

I live in a very wise place where people have "enough" time to teach. 

The wind has died down at last. The plastic Adirondack chairs beside the firepit in the back yard have blown over.  There is a smooth barked log in the front of the fire that is starting to have rectangular embered sections but the pages from this "book" are larger and less distinct. It is burning in a more cohesive way. I'll have to find a log like this in the wood shed, to show to one of our friends, so that I can ask what kind of wood it is. But for now, as I sit here by myself waiting for H to get home, I am beginning to learn how it warms.