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30 Driving Back from Crotched Mountain, Winter Storm, new year’s eve The man in front of me—what’s he doing?—pulls over, no signal, to the side of the road, gets out, begins sloughing his way, stooped and bent against the wind, to what I presume is his driveway winding up and around the small box of a cabin which is his home. He is waving me around, annoyed somehow, his left arm swooping low above the snow in a way no man younger than himself would wave someone around, as if he’d been a soldier or farmer all his life, as if he lived a little closer to the ground, his arm a sweeping scythe, as if it were his holy job to wave the world to go around, as if he were my father, consigned instead of hell to Peterborough, New Hampshire, where it turns out it always snows, where he’d have to shovel the length of his driveway before his car would even have a prayer of making it up the hill, and where he’d know the minute he finished, when all the clouds had piled themselves like drunken sheep into the darkest corner of his day, the town would come and plow him in again, as if he were Brueghel’s eternal herdsman, his thick black oxen never reaching town, all the steady, nervy peasants passing him by, heading to a festival, some Candlemas of earth’s delights, even Icarus dropping in, everyone in a lather, the milkmaids and butcher boys, all cruddy and hopeful, thinking love—what else?— is waiting for them just up the road, the man—what is his problem?—waving them ahead. ...

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