Let it snow . . .

I don't usually blog about the weather, but it is the dominating fact of our lives at the moment. The snow arrived last Friday night and the threat of more stopped us going away at the week-end. It wasn't too bad yesterday: my husband got his car out and our daughter got to school. But this morning we woke up and realised that we weren't going anywhere. Six inches of snow had fallen on top of what was already there. The school was closed. My husband decided he had better work at home.
Before it happened I was groaning in anticipation of the sheer inconvenience and extra effort that would be involved, and yet I have to admit that there are compensations. As I look out of the window this afternoon it is snowing again and it is intensely beautiful. All I can see are trees and snow and the neighbour's woodshed. The brillance of the light is invigorating. It could be Sweden or Finland. A while ago my daughter and I walked up our lane to the main road. Normally there are cars whizzing up and down. Today virtually all we saw was a gritter and snow plough. We walked up the middle of the road and drank in the silence.
Life is simplified. I can't get to the shops unless I walk to the station and catch a train into Sheffield. So we'll make to do with what we've got and that's fine. The inconvenience really starts when the thaw begins and we have to go out to struggle along on icy pavements and roads. For now though ordinary life is suspended and there is pleasure to be had in drawing the curtains and throwing another log on the fire. And what is the ideal book for the snowbound reader to read in front of that fire? The book I have taken off the shelf is the Dorothy L. Sawyers classic, THE NINE TAILORS, which opens with Lord Peter Wimsey running his car into a snow drift. Time to re-read that, I think.
Before I finish, I said in a recent blog that I'd be reading some more William Maxwell and I have. SO LONG, SEE YOU TOMORROW is even better than TIME WILL DARKEN IT. Just wonderful.

William Maxwell

'In order to pay off an old debt that someone else had contacted, Austin King had said yes when he knew that he ought to have said no, and now at five o'clock of a July afternoon he saw the grinning face of trouble everywhere he turned. The house was full of strangers from Mississippi; within an hour the friends and family he had invited to an evening party would begin ringing the doorbell; and his wife (whom he loved) was not speaking to him.'
So begins William Maxwell's fine novel, TIME WILL DARKEN IT. Maxwell is probably best remembered as the fiction editor of THE NEW YORKER where for almost forty years he edited the work of a galaxy of writers, including John Updyke, Eudora Welty and many others. But he was a highly accomplished novelist in his own right. TIME WILL DARKEN IT is the first of his novels that I have read, but it won't be the last.
From this one mistake that Austin King makes from the best of motives flows a series of consequences that result in catastrophe. A depiction of small-town life, a dissection of a marriage, beautifully organised and described in the kind of detail that brings people and places to life, this is up there with some of the best. It is Chevhovian in its understanding of the compromises that people are driven to, and the ways in which lives can be ship-wrecked. The characters went on living for me at the end of the novel and I wanted to know what happened next. In fact, I just wanted it to go on and on.