Selections from FM GALICIA

25.11

After the snow has fallen and it looks like it will lie there for a while, I start to feel better about my household chores. I know that my arms and shoulders will get a break because I will be provided with transportation. Snow, in itself, is a form of transportation. It can move anything: people, barrels, sacks, logs. Actually, it only becomes capable of transporting when combined with an inclined surface. But where I do my household chores, all the surfaces are somewhat inclined. Besides the snow and the hills, I also have a sled. And that is what provides me with hope that my arms and my shoulders will be relieved.

I don’t know how other people are able to do it. But I never leave my sled just lying there on the road. It lives in my house, in the best spot. That’s how they used to treat livestock, letting them in the house for the winter. The sled greatly affects both the look and the mood of the house. It’s especially pleasant to wake up in the middle of the night and see the sled’s skeleton in my room, lit up by reddened oven tiles (for there is no other source of outer light). At first, you can’t figure out where you are, at what road rest stop it is that you have paused your journey. Then you realize that indeed it is your sled that is resting for the night in your house. And it becomes very pleasant to fall asleep knowing that tomorrow there will be the day, there will be snow and there will be the sled. It is needed to take care of some very important things. Take the borrowed shredder across the river, and, while riding back, walk along the railroad tracks to find a large rock with which to press down the shredded cabbage. You have to ride into the forest and, shaking off the clouds of snow from the spruces, chop off some twigs—some thick spruce branches. They’ll be needed to cover those roots left in the soil. Although these twigs aren’t heavy, carrying a whole armful of them is very cumbersome. But on the sled, it’s very easy. You, of course, have to tie them on with a rope. The twigs look unbelievably beautiful against the snow. I would like to send this carriage down from the mountaintop so that it would ride for a long time. May this mobile green blot intersect the snow slope’s gigantic screen. Instead, I sit on it by myself and begin to steer with my boot. And I ride down to the house. I fly into a haystack which, unlike the sled, I have left outdoors for the winter.

Translated by Mark Andryczyk