Spring’s arrival was still a ways out but despite the snow and sleet it RSVP’d in the dead of winter. The snow was piled high by the street well out of the mailman’s way. The front sidewalk was clear. The neighbors’ walks were clear to boot and their steps swept clean. We did the other side all the way around the corner to the side street where the concrete walk ended. All done for now–Darnit!–until more snow piles up. I loved venturing into the deep to push snow around with grandpa when I was little. He said not to worry, more’s comin’.
Bucky, that’s what everyone called my grandpa since the beginning of time and so then did I, went to put the snowblower away without me. That meant he was going to sit out back on the patio and have a smoke. He told me to go in the back door and take off my boots straight away so Ma-Ma doesn’t yell at us, meaning at him. I called her Ma-Ma mostly, but sometimes I called her Gramma too. She met me in the kitchen to set me up on the chest freezer under the back window and extract me from a pair of green rubber boots. From up there I could see the steam rising from Bucky’s balding head when he sat down at the picnic table and took off his hat. Zip. Clink. Ahh, the shiny scent of that little machine from his right pocket was now swirling round his head in the steam—the sweet aroma that lingers when he extinguishes his Zippo lighter, the knurled steel wheel and thumb-skin on flint, yellow-tip blue flame flickering in a perforated steel stack, fumes rich and wafty as flowers and fossilized sunshine… And I missed it. Darnit, that sun set. Now my boots are off. Ma-Ma said not to worry, more’s comin’.
“Do you want hot chocolate?”
“I want to run the snowblower… yes, I’ll have a hot chocolate. Bucky wants one too.”
“When you get a little bigger… okay then, hot chocolate for two.”
Ma-Ma made good hot chocolate, not the powder mix but with milk stirred and warmed slowly in a pot under her swirling eye and sterling spoon. The chocolate went in to melt and her spoon spun with a silvery clunk now and then on the pot muted under the milk. “You have to keep the flame low and the milk moving,” she’d tell me.
It was on a day cold and snowy like that with lots of reasons for the frequent hot drink when it would show up out of the blue. Someone usually retrieved the mail soon after the mailman went through, across the front porch like a letter storm in a poncho. “Look what came today!” Ma-Ma or Bucky would yell to the other closing the door in winter’s face and a little burst of spring blew in instead of the usual blast of cold. “It gets here earlier every year, I swear,” would come the return.
And there it was, planted it the mailbox to be sprinkled about, threshed and picked through at the kitchen table after dinner: the first Seed Catalog of the season. We’d always have good talks at the kitchen table and the ones over the seed catalogs were especially so with plans for the hothouse and the gardens, spring, summer and fall. Maybe we’d plan our next expedition out. More snow’s on the way. Maybe we could suit up again tomorrow and blaze a path to the greenhouse to patch holes and put bricks down for a floor like Gramma wants. I’d bring it up when the table’s warm.
Bucky wet a few fingertips on their way to cracking open the new catalog. Colorful pictures of farm, garden and flowerbed bounty blooming in rows of fine print and charts on big crunchy pages. There were some good drawings as well for the stuff with no photo. It was fresh and needed to be roughed up like last year’s edition with marked pages and bent corners, coffee cup stains and food bits and cigarette ash in the fold. Ink and paper have always smelled so good. Since I first heard that sharks can smell a drop of blood in the water from a mile away, I’ve always imagined that it must smell to them as a fine vintage of ink and paper smells to me. I love the smell of fresh blood too but when you put it on paper and let it age a while it only gets finer. Bucky knew the tomato breeds and quantities required by heart. But… What else are we going to plant this year?; that was The Question. Bucky and I would sit at the table and figure it out. Ma-Ma would say, “I want that in the living room when you’re done with it!” She’d rake over the flower section later.