egg

Inside, it’s sprouts of red winter kale, giant Fordhook chard, celery, leeks and a handful of onions.

Outside, it’s 3 feet of hard-packed snow. It’s solid enough we can walk on top of it, giving us a whole new vantage: we’re eye level with the windows in the upper story of the barn; we can walk over the tops of the fences; we can inspect trees that usually arch overhead by walking up to them and looking down.

It’s sunny and warm today, so some of this snow will melt, but more of it will just compress, and when the temperatures drop to the low teens tonight, as they will, the snow will form an even harder cap over the ground. It’s hard to imagine what waits below it all: surely it’s just mud and rock and battered grass. But it feels like when it goes a tiny ice age will have passed and there’ll be little bones to dig up and artifacts of past cultures to collect.