Every time the snows of winter become really deep, I think of Granny Profitt. Of course I never knew Granny, but learned enough about her to form an opinion from her grandson, Clay Profitt, who is now an old man.
Sometimes it’s easy to figure that being in the country is like coming home after life’s long road trip; like sleeping in your own bed after too many restless nights in cold and lonely hotels-hotels that can charge the same as a month’s worth of groceries for a space that has the soul of a can of pickled beets.
My education of country sausage and rural problem solving taught me that…along with notions about fresh, fallen snow.
Ah, Sausage. Say what you like in repeating the chants of any nutritional expert’s dogma, but I dare anybody to turn down a well cooked hunk of fresh country sausage, when the delicious aroma comes floating upon the cool morning air. You can eat tasteless salads for the next week to compensate, but you’ll always come back for more. Some might say that the reflex reaction folks have to fresh country sausage cooking is one of the strongest urges of the human animal-I don’t know about that.
That’s one of the many perks of living in the country- fresh sausage. If country is all about sausage, then Clay Profitt is the country king. He can thank Granny Profitt for that.
See, she created the family recipe with spices you could never imagine, and that makes all the difference. She once claimed she could mix some old alfalfa with her special spices and any city folk would claim it was the best they ever ate. If you ask Clay, he would just laugh, but it is not the type of laugh you’d be expecting-it is more of a mystery laugh.
The next best thing about a rural lifestyle, next to fresh sausage, is problem solving: Someone once said that city folks have opinions while country folks just have solutions.
Country folks know how to solve problems. It takes some time getting used to their deep focus on solutions. You’d be talking to someone and casually mention a problem you are having, suddenly they get this real serious look on their face, peck a few numbers into their cell phone and you hear, “Billy, this is Clay, I got someone here who needs…(such and such)… I’ll send him right over.” That’s how it works-it’s absolutely amazing the efficiency in which problems vaporize here.
For every problem there is always someone near with a solution. There is not much static time for anything as unproductive as opinions-opinions are for folks with a lot of free time on their hands, of which rural folks have very little.
You can define Granny Profitt in three notions: problem-solving, sausage and deep snow.
I remember the sentiment from a poem once about snow. I forget the entire verse but the notion was-To see the snow in the country it is hard not to believe in God. To see snow in the city it’s hard not to believe in Satan. It is funny how single things can exist and be translated oppositely.
Snow is magical in the country. Shapes are defined indiscriminately as the crystallized powder paints everything; bushes, trees, fence posts, rocks, vehicles-everything is treated equal- an organic airbrush painted by the Master-no extreme whiteness has ever been duplicated in any tube of paint.
The beauty of virgin snow is so spectacular, yet such an illusion you know it can’t last. Once you molest the Master’s sculpture, with squeaks of each booted footsteps, the magic is destroyed forever. Soon it only takes a few foot and paw tracks to redefine the landscape from dream to reality.
But for those too brief first moments the world is pure and the fantasy is tangible.
I always like to walk around the farm and surrounding woods after a deep snowfall. Nothing hides from the evidence that footprints in the snow reveal. Even birds must land. Whatever native critters enjoy in their natural stealth as such is moot, everything is declared.
You can tell a lot about what’s going on inside a critter’s brain by their tracks in the snow. It does not take too much imagination to translate such patterns of critter prints to the more complex, life-tracks of their human counterparts.
Some footsteps are deliberate; as if the critter knows exactly where it is going… like they are late for some critter meeting or social.
Others footsteps define a critter that might be searching; Is it here? Nope, how about here? Naw, let me try some other place…maybe over there… It is not uncommon to see the same critter circle around the same object many times, assumingly with the same negative results. Then they press on perhaps forgetting what it was they were searching for in the first place- I know some humans like that, Ah-hem.
That is what Clay Profitt says he remembers most about his Granny, her footsteps in the snow.
It was one cold February day after a fresh snow had fallen. Granny knew she would die that day, but faithful to her constitution she wanted to wait until her chores were finished. Perhaps eating all that fresh sausage finally caught up with her. At ninety six years of age it wasn’t a shock and she herself was well ready. After feeding all of the livestock that morning she came in, made breakfast for the clan, washed all the dirty pots and dishes, went to her room, laid down and fell into everlasting sleep.
Clay remembers best that it came upon his narrow, seven year old shoulders to assume Granny’s livestock feeding chores. That very next day after she died the weather had been still for the last twenty-four hours. He wasn’t sure about the proper sequence of feeding but he was able to follow his Granny’s footsteps of the day before from one phase to the next: Chicken feed from the bin-check the water can; throw hay bales to the cows, then two pails of feed from the corn pen, a bucket full from the barrel of oats for the horses and then the birdseed-Granny always took care of her birds in the dead of winter.
It was as if Granny had left a detail set of instructions with her footprints, a tangible guidance from one generation gone to the next.
And, of course, the most important livestock of all was feeding the pigs. Granny had names for all of the other livestock-even the chickens, but she had only the same name for all of the pigs-she called them all Sausage.
Clay Profitt never forgot that idea of footsteps… and then and there figured to live each day as if he might pass on his footsteps for someone else to follow.
I wonder if someone was to find my footsteps in the snow, what would it reveal; someone who was impatient, lost, confused or on the verge of another new, grand discovery.
It’s funny how something as small, light and simple as snowflakes can conjure such a deep introspection.
Clay said he learned many things from Granny that probably transcends all time. Not the least of was: there is no one more beautiful than someone you are in love with, the humility of someone who knows they are right and the sound and smell of fresh sausage cooking on the morning stove.
Heck, maybe life’s not all that complicated after all.
