It is Monday. Geoffrey had planned to travel over the mountains today. A fire smolders in the stove but does not warm the silent rooms as he gets up and slowly moves about. He goes outside to the car, which is coated with pitted ice, and manages to get it started. The heater blows cold air until the engine warms, and then the little steel cocoon of warmth follows a winding road up the mountain, winding up out of the little valley. Beyond the top of the ridge, a larger valley hides under a soft, gray featherbed of fog.

The freezing drizzle has glazed the forest. The scene resembles a black, white and gray Verichrome rendering of some forgotten woodland. It recalls an old photo of a forest that had been replaced by neat rows of brick ramblers fifty years after the picture was taken. Each house was built on its own tidy little lot, side by side with the others that line the curving roads marked with green signposts that bear names like "Forest Glen Lane."

As the icy woodland rolls by, Geoffrey gets to the place where he always spots the deer that had been put under one of the trees left by the landscapers. The deer's neck is always upraised and still; black paint continues to fade on eyes that never acknowledge the approach of the car.

The photo had a white border and serrated edges and had been tossed into the bottom of a wooden box lying under several rolls of yellowing window shades and some wooden clothes hangers up in the attic. The box was left there, along with all the other stuff that had been taken up and forgotten about sometime during the early sixties. The house had since been sold off along with everything else the day of the auction. Sixty five years' worth of personal household belongings were spread out in the sunlight that day. One by one they were carted away in minivans to unknown destinations as the auctioneer's voice droned cicada-like in the background, on and on into the sultry afternoon.

The new people who had moved into the houses had never thought about how the forest may have looked before the bulldozers shaped the roads and lots, nor did they ever talk much about what had been on the land before the subdivision existed; the subject never seemed to come up. And so, the forest had never really existed at all, because no one could remember it.

At the top of the ridge, Geoffrey encounters a vast trough of whiteness rolling away from his view, framed by the icy windshield. A line of ridges sweep unevenly in each direction, losing themselves in the fog. He is suddenly aware of a tinny babble of voices clamoring from somewhere in the vast stillness. Here on the summit, the radio has picked up a distant city coming in through miles of foggy static. He reaches out absently and turns a dashboard knob to extinguish the intrusion, not quite aware that he has even done so.

After the long climb, the road abruptly swings downward. Beyond the hood of the car, the macadam strip disappears like a tarnished knife that has been plunged into a jar of marshmallow at an angle. The cloudy whiteness swirls closer, encircling and then finally swallowing the car. Minutes later Geoffrey is moving down along the underside of the mist, down to where the river courses through the vain dominion of humans.

Down in the valley, Geoffrey's radio is on again, full of weather news. Primary and secondary roads are clear, fog in higher elevations. The school busses made it to the schools. The morning shifts got in to work. Hey, more classic hits and volleys of upbeat commercials. A Ford with big tires and a plastic hood shield that says "yoB yrtnuoC" noses into the rear view mirror. Geoffrey considers the fact that he may be driving too slowly, and his right foot involuntarily twitches forward. He takes his place in the stream of cars and trucks flowing through the town, and cruises past the Belly-Up Burger Barn and the Stonewall Mini-mall. Glancing at blinking digits on the lime-green clock that is pasted to the dash, Geoffrey discovers that he is late.

January had been a mild month; there was hardly any snow. Lately, you could detect a smug tone in conversations about the weather, about how the rest of February would be OK, probably. But Effie Jett, who lives on down the road by herself, wasn't impressed. In a few months, the tomatoes in Effie's garden will ripen before anyone else's; it always happens that way.

"It ain't done, yet," Effie had mentioned.

Tuesday night, as Geoffrey lay underneath thick blankets in the darkness of his room, seven inches of snow silently materialize on the ground before dawn. The radio is back on in the morning, brimming with comments about the snow. Outside, the sun is flooding its golden brightness on a diamond-studded universe of glittering light. Geoffrey stands at the center of it, holding the snow shovel.

He shovels paths along the driveway, to the woodshed, the mailbox, and the barn. The firewood has run out again. He wades down the hill, down through the woods to the edge of the stream, to a cache of small, dead trees that had been cut a long time ago and left laying on the ground. Piece by piece, he drags the soggy wood through the snow, back up to the woodshed at the top of the hill next to the house.

Overhead, blasts of wind are punching puffs of snow from tree limbs. They sink down slowly; tiny blizzards of shimmering powder, drifting down everywhere; thick white gunsmoke from some hushed battle that is being fought against a fathomless blue sky. The cold smoke reddens his cheeks and makes the back of his neck feel wet. The wind and the stream that is flowing at the bottom of the hill are the only sounds.

The cistern is still out of water on Thursday. The refill remains up on the roof, frozen. Geoffrey lugs the pump down the hill to the stream. His socks slowly work themselves down around his ankles, turning themselves into donuts ringing his arches. Wet snow invades one of the boots, making direct contact with the warm, bare skin on the foot.

He clears a patch in the snow next to the stream, connects the hose, and the pump starts squirting water into the two hundred feet of garden hose hiding under the snow. Geoffrey clambers back up the hill to the house, finds the cistern-end of the hose and pokes it through a little hole in the wooden cover. A pause. Then the pitiful echo of a small stream of falling water begins to reverberate up from the depths of the cistern. Geoffrey gazes down at the cover, wondering about what it would be like to be locked away in a cold dungeon.

Friday night, stars glitter in a black sky. Frigid wind petrifies chocolate sculptures of boot prints in the muddy patches where the snow had begun to thaw. Old, dead leaves rise up swirling like mad zombies to dogfight in the glare of headlights that sweep along dark and desolate country roads. A giant yellow full moon suddenly peeks over the east ridge. And then, almost as quickly, retreats shyly behind a veil of smoke-gray cloud that has become embroidered with the silver strands of her own light. The moon has changed her mind. Her soft face is abused by the harsh wind, and she declines to remain in the rude company of a cold February night.

Saturday. The air turns thin and pristine beneath a glowing gray canopy of tangled, upside-down furrows plowed into the confused underside of thick clouds. Occasional inverted mounds of milk-glass look as though a light is turned on inside them. Elsewhere, the clouds are ominously violet-colored and dark. Here and there jagged holes tear open, allowing blue sky and sunlight to burst through, splashing bright orange-gold paint upon the drab and barren ridges, whose dormant plainness suddenly looks out of place.

On Sunday, a pale sun ventures out. Geoffrey does, too, and notices the tips of Crocuses among the patches of melting snow, pointing jaunty fingers up from underground. "Don't be gray!" they say, "February has gone away!" The fields respond with a hint of pale green that begins to want to shade the dull landscape, the first suggestion of color on the pallid cheeks of one who is finally recovering from a long, debilitating illness.

Where the garden had been, old weed-mummies lay everywhere. Geoffrey feels like an immigrant who, after living in exile for many years, finally returns to the homeland. The pilgrimage is so poignantly familiar.

Geoffrey reaches down. The black soil feels damp and smells musty and sweet. He straightens up and stands with his hands shoved down deeply into the pockets of his coat. Filling his eyes are visions of green plants polka-dotted with red tomatoes and bordered by yellow and orange marigolds. The sun gently lays a halo of warmth on his head and shoulders as he looks up. Breezes tenderly ruffle his hair that is shining with a golden aura of sunlight and life.

Up on the hill, an old claptrap tiller waits, still decorated with grimy medals from last spring: ribbons of old stems and beads of tiny dry clods. Rust covers the tines that were once polished silver by the soil. The tiller will soon be coughing off the shed's chilly gloom and robotically jerking out into the warm sunlight. Cool strips of earth will be turned; dark, soft and inviting, bathed in soft air. As the earth presents herself to the sky, February will have gone to the place where memories of forests tumble among gray dreams and clear water flowing in a stream, everything flowing and flowing and never ceasing to flow.