On this, my eightieth year, there are no maps for me. I’m walking blind.

How long will I be able to continue living at Singing Meadow, my soul place? Where will I go when I no longer can stay here? How would I ever live without the sound of the wind in the trees?

Blind. Musing at my desk, I return to a memory of a sudden north country blizzard.

**

During the years we lived at Foley Mountain my writing time was frequently interrupted by the needs of my husband and his work, as well as those of teenaged sons and elderly mothers. As many of us are, I often felt torn in many directions. When I was offered a month-long retreat north of Wakefield, house-sitting for dear writer friends while they spent time with family in Europe, I seized it. This was my much-needed, uninterrupted chance to spend long days pulling together my novel. Grateful for the precious, uninterrupted time to focus, sheltered by the immense logs of the Lambtons’ pioneer house, I lost myself in working and reworking my words, barely stopping my day to cook myself soup for lunch on the wood-fired cookstove.

“This?” “No that?” Or “What about? “Here, go back a paragraph” “Would she really have spoken that way?” Pecking away on my borrowed laptop, reviewing my draft chapters, I tried hard to avoid asking myself “What were you thinking of?”

By the time the sun sank below the old snow-clad Gatineau hills, I had lost all sharpness. At last it was time to head outdoors into the beautiful wintry landscape before the light diminished.

I pulled on an old work coat, crammed a hand-knitted hunter’s orange hat over my head, pushed my feet into heavy wool socks and moccasins and tugged the back door closed behind me. Trying to get warm, feeling sheltered by the stillness, as I  stumped along the narrow road, taking deep breaths of the clear, cold air, I saw the first stars appear. I scarcely knew what I was doing, only that it felt fine to be walking towards the night.

Still numb from my intensive work, at first I scarcely noticed when a great wind roared up out of nowhere. Too late, instinctively, I turned back, setting my face towards the house. As I did, I was swept up by a whirling tumult of snowflakes almost as big as birds.

Fully awake now, I realized my danger. Darkness was approaching. After walking without attention, I barely knew where I was. My usual senses were no use to me. There was no light, and beyond the raging wind, no sound. Utterly alone in the cold twilight, blinded by the demonic whiteness, how would I find my way back to the warm farmhouse? For all I knew this storm would last all night long.

‘Go with your feet,’ an unfamiliar instinct told me. ‘Hurry!’ I broke into a dog trot, searching with my moccasined feet in the quickly-disappearing ruts of the laneway, feeling my way. “Just keep going. That’s important!” I fell into an unfamiliar rhythm, my face whipped by the stinging flakes until there was nothing except the sensing of my feet and the fire in my lungs.

Then, as abruptly as the snow had enveloped me, it stopped. The wild wind halted. The sky opened, still faintly blue. There were the stars again. Not far ahead of me loomed the big log house, with the cheering lamps I had left in the windows.

**

That night, buffeted by the storm, finding my way home had felt beyond me. I could only say, as the Quakers would, that I was lead. Today I remember this. Lost as I am, small as I am, as I age, my question is “How do I go on when I lose my way? How do I go on beyond knowing?

I am so deeply enmeshed in Singing Meadow, the home Barry and I built together, that I cannot imagine severing all the ties.

But for now, as I head into my new year, small and great love, the words from the name of my blog, (Small, With Great Love) feel more necessary than ever. If I have no steadying sureness about what’s ahead, there still is so much to love. That is where I will go while I still can.