"I hadn't thought of going again this year," Timothy took off his glasses now and laid them on the closed book. "I don't usually go after the middle of September. Soon the road'll be closed even to Milton."
"Closed!"
"In a few weeks now the snow'll begin."
"Nobody can get in after the snow begins," the old woman explained.
"Nothing can get through!"
"Nothing gets through after the snow begins. Pretty soon it'll come and we'll be shut in tight till Spring."
Anne rose quickly. "Shut—in—tight till Spring!"
Timothy nodded and his eyes lit as if in welcome of the snow.
"Oh, it's wonderful then," he said softly. "You think it's quiet and peaceful now, but it ain't nothing to what it is then—between the storms. You'll love it, white and so still you can almost hear God movin' round. And then the storms." He rose, the first restless motion Anne had ever seen him make. "They're wonderful. Trees that have stood for centuries go crashing down. Mountain sides slip away." His eyes blazed as if he were watching the Creator at work. "When Spring comes, it's a new world. Me and Mary go round like children, don't we, mother, looking up things to see if they're there yet. Last Spring that little creek down there came a~bubbling up to look at us, just like a new baby, laughing and smiling through the snow. It weren't there the year before. A storm cut the channel and there it was dancing and laughing as if it had just been waiting to surprise us. Wasn't it, mother?"
The old woman nodded. "And do you remember that spruce we used to call 'The Hunchback?'" She turned to Anne. "It was so old and twisted and it never seemed happy, like other spruces; they're always so glad and straight. We used to wish a storm would take him, for his own sake, and one winter that gorge yonder opened and when Spring came, he was gone."