Snowski

When I walked Lily to the cemetery and the reservoir today I noticed that even more kinds of trees, not just the red maples, had delicate fluff and buds on their branches. I could hear a woodpecker loud and clear. We stopped at the ballfield in Turbesi Park. I was surprised to see the snow in the fenced-in field completely untouched since the last snowfall; no dogs, cats, squirrels, bunnies, or people had walked through it. I blocked off the entrances with the big plastic trash barrels and let Lily run free. She ran in circles like a race horse, and when I threw a snowball for her she caught it in her mouth and hunkered down and ran even faster. Something about catching snowballs makes her go wild. I think it's the sensation of the snowball bursting in her mouth. As Lily ran and built up heat she dipped her mouth into the snow to scoop it, eating it while she was running. She tanked up on all that fresh snow.

Now the baseball field was covered with rings of dog tracks! It looked like a whole pack of dogs had been there. As we played in the snow I spotted a person off in the distance walking awkwardly across the other baseball field. It looked like a very old man in pain. As the person got closer I could see it was a thin middle-aged woman wearing cross-country skis. She moved very tentatively across the snow, almost robotically as if she were recovering from an injury and this was her rehabilitation. As she neared the edge of our baseball field Lily went to the fence, jumping up on her hind legs, hoping meet her, but the woman was looking down, focused on her movement. She skied extremely slowly and methodically across all of the open spaces in the park.

Lily and I headed home. On the way out I could see that the skier had left a meandering trail of long thin lines in the snow. Her ski tracks led to an opening, a gate along the back fence that perhaps opened into her yard. When I got home I wiped Lily down and had a peanut butter and jam sandwich and a cup of hot tea. I fell asleep on the couch and later woke up to the cawing of crows in our tree.