
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, February 11, 1991                   TAG: 9102110245
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-9   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: MONTY S. LEITCH
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FALLOUT/ A SNOW IS NEEDED TO HIDE THE YARD MESS

THE BACK yard is still littered with the branches that our ice storm broke several weeks ago. We spent several dreary mornings dragging them over to the bald spot in front of the barn where we sometimes burn brush.

There were too many to pile, though, and so we left them scattered around in loose, ragged clumps, as if they'd fallen from their mother trees there instead of all around the edges of the yard.

The Christmas tree is in among the fallen branches, as are a few fence-posts we pulled this summer and the brush we pruned from a nandina and the lilacs. It's hard to find a calm, damp afternoon when both of us are home, so brush doesn't get burned here as often as it should.

And so the back yard is filled with devastation, with broken growth and excess.

I'd hoped we'd have a snow to cover all the mess. That's the role of snow, you know: to cover what's died in fall, to wipe clean the slate for what will come brand new in spring. Snow buries old hopes and failed promises as much as it buries the tulips that failed to bloom, the pear tree that fell in on itself at the first sign of adversity, the scattered rotten leaves of all those irises.

But this sodden, half-cold winter has brought only rain, devastating ice, and fog that merely hides what's moldering in the fields; it doesn't purify a thing.

I remember a winter when we had snow up to our knees, when we skated on a neighbor's ponds every afternoon for a month. That was a clean, crisp winter, as bright and white as the new sheet of paper on which you start a new list of goals; that was a winter as full of renewal as a religious rite.

I wanted such a winter this year, as I've wanted it every year since. And maybe we'll have it yet. It's snowed in March before.

But today it appears those devastated branches will lie bare and skeletal in the back yard for another month or more, reminding me of what this winter has cleared away, and of what it's brought down with it.

by CNB