Cows are led smoking to the watering tubs by the well, and the dog lifts his leg and leaves an orange lace on the snow. The small boy writes his small name in the same orange lace beside his father's heavy signature on the white wall of the path. Nights, the men catch up with the news with the unaccustomed spectacles on the ends of their noses. The new snowstorm roars through the spruces, and the flakes go up as much as down. The winds are north or north-west ones, and they rattle old teeth and old hemlocks.
The dish of the month is pork gravy. The wife of the house gets a chunk of salt pork from the barrel down-cellar and cuts it into pieces the size of her husband's thumb. She fries the pieces in the spider till they are an airy brown and are ready to float out of the seething fat. She mixes her flour thickening, a pint of water, and two tablespoons of flour already stirred into two tablespoons of water and all the lumps gotten out. She douses in the pint of thickening into the smoking spider, the fire at white heat from the birch-wood, and she stirs it into a creamy miracle with her iron spoon. She stirs and stirs and uses only her foot to drive the cat away from the codfish she is preparing to go with the gravy. The gravy boils right up and down and thickens around the flying spoon. Mother takes it off at its peak and pours it into the yellow bowl. She sets it at the heart of the table, with the ladling spoon ready. It is for the codfish today. But it is for the roast beef tomorrow, for potatoes white or yellow, for all the meats, and for all the fish. It is the backbone of winter's feasting.
It is a long month, a hard month, the fish and the furrows take a good rest, and a boat is being born. The January world is a world as much inside as out, and a good one. Selah!
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