I set the book down a few minutes ago. I thought Mandyrose was nearly asleep on the couch, curled around Ferret the cat, near enough to the woodstove to feel drowsy/cozy. But now she’s adding some wood to the stove, a piece of elm we cut earlier today. We cut a carload and a half, because there’s eight inches of snow on the way tonight. The boots are drying by the woodstove… it’s cold out now (teens) but hovered around freezing during the afternoon where we cut wood in the snow.

It’s quiet though right now, mostly just the sound of the kettle on the woodstove ticking the way metal kettles with hot water in them tick and crackle (more of a “crickle” than a crackle, really). The snow hasn’t started falling yet, it’s still a state or so away. It’s late enough that there’s no traffic noise from the highway outside, just a truck every few minutes or so. No rooster noises like we hear all during the day.

The other noise we heard a while ago was Ferret being restless. She’ll get a little wild hair and charge fiercely across the wood floor toward some menacing invisible spirit, then pull up short and dive for cover under a chair until we’re both looking at her and she looks back and stands up and says “What? What are you looking at?” Tonight though, she wrestled a ballpoint pen into submission, spinning it around and around until it was too dizzy to resist. Our favorite is the way she plays soccer, dribbling a hair clip or other slidey object across the floorboards between her paws, back and forth. One more distinctive sound.

Now the floorboards are creaking. The steps upstairs are quite creaky; there’s simply no way to go up the stairs quietly. You can try, and can find a partial path up the left side of the first few and the right side of the next few, but then the path is impossibly impassible for the sneaky. It’s time for me to bank some more elm into the woodstove, pack it up full and close down the damper and go make my own creaky way upstairs.