Part 3: Two Winters

Snow comes to the lake town, and two winters run side by side: Vera's first one at the school, and Anna's, fifty-eight years earlier, told by the people who remember it.

Day 24: Snow on the Steps

William Wordsworth wrote that the best portion of a good man's life is his "little, nameless, unremembered, acts of kindness and of love."

I copied the line onto the back of an envelope this morning, because I had just seen one.

Dear Grandmother,

The first snow came in the night. I woke at six to a different kind of quiet, the kind that makes you get up and look before you even know why. The lake had vanished. The reeds, the jetty, the ferry house roof, all of it was white and soft at the edges, like bread rolls dusted with flour before they go in. I put on two jumpers and my boots and went across to open the school.

The steps were already clear. All five of them, swept down to the stone, and the path to the gate too, with the snow banked neatly on either side. There was a thin grey layer of ash scattered over the stone, so nobody would slip. The bootprints went to the gate and away up the road, towards the workshop. They were large, and they had already started to fill with new snow, which meant whoever made them had come in the dark.

I asked Dora when she came in. She said it was not her, she had only just got her own door open. Greta came by at eight on foot, pushing the green bicycle through the drifts with the post bag on the handlebars, and I asked her too. She looked at me for a long moment, and then she said she had seen a lamp moving about the school yard at half past five, and she had not thought it her business to ask whose it was.

Mila arrived at nine with snow up to her knees. She was the last one in. While she was unwinding her scarf she told Bea, in a voice the whole room could hear, that her dad had got up when it was still night and had been very grumpy at breakfast. Bea asked why. Mila said she did not know. Then she saw me looking and went red and sat down.

I said nothing in class. At the end of the day Tomas came to fetch her, as he does when the road is bad, and I went out on the steps and thanked him. He looked at the steps as if he were seeing them for the first time. "Someone was up early," he said. Then he lifted Mila over the drift by the gate and they walked home. He did not turn round. I stood there longer than I needed to.

The ash was the thing I liked most. It is so practical. Here is how to do it, and anyone with a stove can try it the next time the steps freeze. Save the cold ash from the morning, a small bucket of it, and keep it dry by the door. When the stone is icy, scatter a thin layer over it, the way you dust a board before rolling pastry. It does not melt anything, but it gives your boots something to hold. It costs nothing, and in the spring it washes into the garden.

All day I noticed how quiet the snow made everything. The children's voices in the yard sounded far away, even when they were close. I read about it tonight. Fresh snow is mostly air, caught between the flakes, and those tiny pockets swallow sound the way a thick rug does in a room with a wooden floor. When the snow packs down, or freezes hard, the quiet goes, and footsteps crunch again. So the first morning is the quietest one. It does not come back until the next fresh fall.

I keep thinking about your winter here. You were alone in this house, Grandmother, with this same stove and these same five steps. Did somebody clear them for you, before dawn, and say nothing? I would not be surprised. I would not be surprised to learn who it was.

Wordsworth called these acts nameless and unremembered. I think he meant that the people who do them do not want a name for it. Tomas certainly did not. But I am a teacher, and I write things in registers, and I am not very good at forgetting. So I will keep this one, nameless, in the tin. Little things kept like that do not spoil. They are like jam in the cellar, waiting for a dark day.

Vera

Day 25: The Frozen Crossing

Percy Shelley ended his poem to the west wind with a question: "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?"

Emil quoted it to me today, and then said that some winters make you doubt it.

Dear Grandmother,

The lake has begun to freeze. Not all of it, only a white rim along the shore that grows a little wider every night, with black water still moving in the middle. The children stand at the edge at break and throw pebbles to hear them skate. I have made a rule, and they keep it: nobody steps off the shore until Emil says so. He is the only one in town who reads the ice like a page.

I went to the ferry house with a bag of potatoes from Dora, and Emil had the stove going and his chair turned to the window. He was watching the rim of ice. "It came early like this once," he said. "The winter your grandmother was here."

That year, he told me, the cold came in the second week of December and did not let go. The ferry froze in at the jetty one night with its rope still on, and his father could not break it out. For two weeks nothing crossed. Then the ice grew thick enough to walk on, though nobody yet trusted it.

On the far shore there was a farm, and on the farm a girl called Marta, eight years old, one of your pupils. She had a fever and had not been at school for a week. Her mother sent word round by the road, which was long and blocked with snow, that Marta was asking for her teacher and would not settle. The doctor had been and said she would mend. But she was crying for her lessons, and for you.

"So she went," Emil said. "Across the ice. Straight across, with a basket and a scarf over her mouth."

He said he saw you from the jetty, a small dark figure already a hundred steps out, and that his heart nearly stopped. He took his father's long pole and a coil of rope and went after you. He did not call out. He was afraid that if you turned, you would lose your nerve, and that a frightened person on ice is in more danger than a calm one. So he walked behind you, keeping his distance, testing the ice with the pole, all the way to the far shore.

You did not know he was there until you reached the farm gate and looked back. He said you stood with the basket on your arm and stared at him, and then you laughed, and he said he did not know whether to be angry or to laugh too. In the basket were Marta's reading book, a slate, and a jar of soup wrapped in a towel. You stayed an hour. You read to her. Then the two of you walked back together, side by side this time, as the light went.

"Was she cross with you for following?" I asked.

"She said I should have walked beside her," he said. "So I did, after that."

In the old days, people here marked the safe way over the ice with branches. When the lake froze hard, the men cut young spruce trees and stood them in holes along the route, every fifty steps or so, so that anyone crossing in snow or at dusk could walk from one green tree to the next. Emil said his father planted the line every winter, from the jetty to the far farm, and took them up again before the thaw. The children called it the forest on the lake.

When I left, Emil gave me two potatoes back, baked in his stove, and told me to put one in each coat pocket. "For your hands," he said. "My mother did it for us." I walked home with my fingers wrapped round them, and they stayed warm until the school gate. It is the simplest thing. Bake a potato, wrap it in a cloth or put it straight in your pocket, and walk. When you get home, you can eat it. Anyone could try it on a cold evening, and I think I will do it every day until spring.

Shelley asked whether spring could be far behind. Emil said that on the far shore, with the soup jar empty and the girl asleep, you said almost the same thing. You said that winter makes the walk longer, that is all. I do not think you were only talking about the ice. I think you were already walking beside him, and did not know yet how short your own spring would be.

Your Vera