Middle Tennessee has one metaphorical foot in the Midwest and one in the Deep South. We expect a certain amount of weather whiplash here, even without factoring in the extremities of climate change, but January has been a carnival ride. Thunderstorms and tornadoes followed by brutal cold and then by snow the likes of which we haven’t seen in years. Eight inches at our house, up to 10 in other Nashville neighborhoods.
Last week, temperatures dropped into the single digits at night and didn’t rise much higher during the day. On Thursday afternoon it finally got warm enough to soften the streets to slush, but another hard freeze turned them back to ice on Thursday night. Then back to single-digit lows for the weekend.
This kind of weather is alarming, even for one who has come to love winter and worries that it is disappearing entirely into the maw of the climate calamity.
When it snows in the South, with its dearth of snowplows and its even greater dearth of snow-experienced drivers, ordinary life comes to a screeching halt. Many people lose work they can’t afford to lose, while others risk their lives to get to jobs they aren’t allowed to miss. Then there’s the urgent question of how to protect the unhoused: Where can hundreds of homeless people go to keep warm when the high is 12 degrees?
Weather like this is a risk for wildlife, too. With ice and snow, food sources become inaccessible just when many creatures — everybody who doesn’t rely on hibernation, brumation or torpor to survive winter — are rapidly burning calories to stay warm. Just before the winter storm hit, I topped off all our seed feeders and stocked up on high-fat, high-protein foods like suet and peanuts and live mealworms.
Shelter is also a struggle for wild animals, especially since we lost so many evergreens to last winter’s terrible storm. So I spread some evergreen boughs across the top of our brush pile to add a layer of protection for the creatures who hide there. My husband hauled home our neighbors’ discarded Christmas trees and leaned them against the fence for the same reason. We left the toolshed door cracked for creatures who prefer an actual roof, and it’s good we did. When the storm hit, it brought more snow than Nashville typically sees in a year.
The next morning, it was 10 degrees, with a wind chill of zero, and the snow was still falling. All was stillness. Not a squirrel in the trees. Not a bird on the feeders. I checked on all my backyard neighbors and saw not a single one. “This is the time to be slow,” the Irish poet John O’Donohue wrote, “Lie low to the wall / Until the bitter weather passes.” Animals understand this truth better than we do.
But they came out, ravenous, when the snow stopped falling. Along the deck rails, squirrels fashioned bunting in the snowpack, a squirrel-sized dip for each hop as one squirrel after another followed the same path to the peanuts.
For the better part of a week we were hermits, the calendar wiped clean of all appointments. School was canceled for my schoolteacher husband. Also canceled were all the meetings I’d set up for myself in a New Year’s resolution to seek embodied connection. By the third snowbound day, my gregarious husband was growing antsy, but I am a hermit by nature. I especially love a hermitage built of silence and snow.
Oh the joy of standing at the window to watch the gobbling — and sometimes the sharing, and very often the stealing — as every bird in the ZIP code showed up to feast on seeds. It was too cold to put out the live mealworms, but I kept replenishing the seeds. When I couldn’t safely reach the tray feeders in the yard or the tube feeders next to the deck, I spread towels on top of the snow and covered them with shelled peanuts and whole peanuts, sunflower hearts and whole sunflower seeds, thistle and safflower and suet balls.
All avian creation set up camp in our yard. Redbirds and bluebirds. Eastern towhees and dark-eyed juncos and white-throated sparrows. House finches and goldfinches. Carolina wrens and Carolina chickadees. Tufted titmice and white-breasted nuthatches. Blue jays and mockingbirds and mourning doves and nearly every kind of backyard woodpecker: downy woodpeckers and hairy woodpeckers, red-bellied woodpeckers and Northern flickers. Grackles and starlings and brown-headed cowbirds and red-winged blackbirds.
The birds were a flurry of motion set against a tableau of stillness: jostling and rustling, flitting between the seeds on the ground and the water in the heated bird bath, rising as one when I opened the back to door to take out the dog, diving for cover when the blue jays sent out a warning that hawks were on the wing.
In Memphis, people were dancing in the snowy streets. In Wilson County and in Knoxville, river otters seemed to be doing the same thing. From every room in our house, I could hear the sledders squealing on the hill just past our yard. Their dogs leaped joyfully beside them, at least until they discovered the suet balls in our mealworm feeders. We didn’t mind. It’s hard to fault a cold dog for grabbing a snack made mostly of peanut butter.
In “The Book of (More) Delights,” the poet and essayist Ross Gay writes about the gift of time that opens up whenever he unexpectedly arrives at an appointment early, or when the person he plans to meet is running late. Such unplanned changes in agenda can feel, he writes, “like the universe just dropped a bouquet of time, and often a luminous bouquet of time, in your lap.”
That’s what a snow day feels like here. A snow day in the American South on an overheating planet is exactly like an extravagant bouquet of luminous time that comes out of nowhere and lasts as long as it cares to, on a schedule we cannot entirely predict, much less control. Last week the sky offered an unexpected gift of time. Thank God I had no choice but to take it.