Walking in the woods with our pup today -- the only sounds the distant hammering of a hungry woodpecker and the shush of dry, fluffy snow underfoot – worried that this may be Richmond’s last snow ever? Last year was troublesome, no sticking snow at all, and a global map in the paper this morning says 2025 was the warmest year on record. So I tip along, head on a swivel, mind a sponge.
You can always count on Robert Frost on a snowy day. When I brushed a laden holly tree and shivered at the sugary sift down my collar, you guessed it, this one came to mind:
The way a crow
Shook down on me
The dust of snow
From a hemlock tree
Has given my heart
A change of mood
And saved some part
Of a day I had rued.
In April of a covid year, I had the good fortune of an invitation to lecture in Vermont and took the opportunity while there to drive out to Frost’s writing cabin to look for that hemlock tree. Maybe it’s a Vermont thing (and if so I approve), but there was no sign for the turnoff, so I relied on a Google Map marker, and followed a dirt road through woods - yes! hemlocks! -- until I came to a two-story white frame house at the edge of a clearing, no one else about.
Morning fog was giving way to drizzle, winter hanging tough in early spring. I read a sign in the driveway, oh my, this was it! Frost’s home, now kept up by student volunteers from Middlebury College.
And there at the far edge of the field tucked near the woods stood the poet's cabin, his writing haven, all mine alone on this morning to explore. A disused dirt road, bordered on both sides by the remnants of stone fences, led up to the cabin. Remembering Frost’s Mending Wall, a project sorely needed there, and noting the papery trunks of birch trees that might have engendered his wonderful Birches – would the old man have tried to swing from one? – I practically tiptoed, enchanted, up to the cabin door.
Here is what I saw. Everything he needed to write those timeless lines -- solitude, nature, windows on three sides, a stone fireplace, a good leather chair with a writing board laid across its arms, a simple desk with uncomfortable side chairs to discourage long visits, and home and lunch just across the field.
Later I watched a documentary in which the Irish poet Seamus Heaney said he knelt and kissed the stone step at Frost’s door. Wish I’d thought to do the same. Instead, I committed a crime, swiping a baseball-sized stone from the broken-down fence and a curl of birch bark fallen from a tree near his cabin. (They rest near my desk, talismans.)
Marveling at the absolute rightness of this poet’s retreat, so perfectly in line with the wise and rustic poems composed there, I wandered out into the field, down to the house, and craned my neck to glimpse through the windows the dining table, library, and old-timey kitchen, where Frost’s long-suffering wife made a home for her curmudgeonly spouse, maybe checking from time to time at smoke curling up from the cabin chimney.
Another magical thing about that morning: I was by myself there the whole time. Like walking alone in a museum or cathedral, no time limit or don’t touch signs. Such a lucky day. I drove off to my talk, at an inn near a lake, and that evening wrote my own Frostian poem in earshot of a pair of loons.
This morning, a dust of snow shaken down on me in what may be our last snow of the year (or ever), my mind roams back to a field in a woods in Vermont, grateful that this quintessential American poet got up even on chilly mornings, stomped through snow to his cabin, started up a wood fire, gazed out at the low hills beyond, and sat with pen and paper as long as it took.
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