With thanks to Artemii

[ambitious_wench]

artemii Quoted this lovely bit in her journal today. Since I have friends that have outdated browsers that might not be able to access it and some who simply do not wish to register with the New York Times in order to read it, I am quoting the entire article here.

I find the writing particularly lovely.

Enjoy.

December 19, 2003
THE RURAL LIFE

Quarantine
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

(Source)

Like half of America, I came down with the flu recently. That means quarantine at the top of the house, in a spare bedroom with a view of the sugar maple and the pasture beyond it, where the horses are standing in falling snow. I was raised to believe that sleep is a sovereign remedy for everything but death itself, so I drift between waking and sleeping, visited mostly by one of the cats, who likes the third floor — a converted attic — as much as I do. I wake just long enough to see the snow falling, and to judge how sick I feel, before drifting off again. The pleasure of it — waking only long enough to know you're dozing — confirms something one of Ishmael's shipmates said in "Moby-Dick": "Damn me, it's worth a fellow's while to be born into the world, if only to fall right asleep."


Wet snow blows in from the east, and then after a day or so, the weather pivots and a hard wind strikes up from the west, gusting from its heels. That's when I can feel the age of this house. The windows rattle. The attic exhaust fan clanks open and shut. The mudroom takes on a chill that won't leave it till spring.


Sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night, I go down to the kitchen and feed the wood stove. But in quarantine, I might as well be sleeping on the roof. That's how far away the wood stove feels. Every now and then the furnace kicks on as if to remind me that it's on my side.


My respect for all the rest of nature increases enormously in winter. The horses stand blanketed in snow, and from time to time they lope around the pasture, just to listen to the icicles on their flanks. It takes a foul night to drive them under cover. The wild turkeys stroll down out of the woods and along the driveway and right up to the mudroom door, as if they were going to knock and come in to get warm. I have yet to see the weather that makes any difference to the ducks or geese. Only the chickens shy away in the snow. They stay snug on their roosts, darning their socks, and, for some reason, our tom turkey has decided to join them.


The wind rises, snow twists in the air, and the venerable honey locust on the edge of the garden cracks and booms as if it's being detonated from within. I expect it to go over any minute. Everyone finds the lee of something to stand in until the wind drops again. As for me, I lie here in the lee of the flu, astonished by the health, the vigor of everything around me, including the crows that huddle on the sugar maple outside, dark clumps of shadow in a white world.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company