The View from a Distance

Animals to tend, wood to cut, and outside the window, a fast-changing world.

ILLUSTRATION BY TOM HAUGOMAT

n the morning of March 24, 2020, we awake to eight inches of new snow. The ground, which had only just begun to emerge in tawny patches from beneath a winter’s worth of accumulation, is again covered. I pull on my chore boots—the good pair, the pair that hasn’t yet split at the crease where they always split midway through their second season of use—and trudge through the snow to milk and feed the cows. The snow is unmarked. Not even the cats have been out yet; they’d mewled at the door as usual, but when I opened it, they just stood there, ears alert and eyes wide, and then retreated back to the comfort of the couch. Well, I could understand why.

We live a seasonal life, here on our Vermont homestead, so I tend to write seasonally, too. If it’s for a winter issue, I’m writing about snow and cold and skiing. Breaking the ice on the cows’ water. Getting stuck and plowing snow. That sort of stuff. If it’s for a summer issue, I write about swimming in the pond or running fence or maybe pulling weeds in the garden (because if nothing else, there’s always weeds to pull).

And here I am, in the July/August issue of Yankee, at the very height of summer. The blueberries are just now ripening, the sweet corn knee-high (you know the saying, right? “Kneehigh by the Fourth of July”?), the tomatoes still green but showing promise, the cows listless in the heat, tails switching lazily back and forth to shoo flies, the boys cannonballing off the big rock into the cool of the pond—yes, all of this right outside our half-open front door. Yet I am writing about a snowstorm in March.

(Continued on p. 118)

Jimmy is all of the patients, doctors, researchers, event participants, and supporters of the Jimmy Fund. Like Carly, who didn’t let her cancer stop her from dancing. Your donation helps change the way the world treats cancer. Because we’re all Jimmy.

Donate now at iamJimmy.org/carly