Wintergreen

>From the book: Christmas In Dairyland (True Stories From a Wisconsin Farm) (August 2003; trade paperback) http://ruralroute2.com As we drove along the dirt road north of our farm one Sunday afternoon, the color of the sky reminded me of Mom's silver cream and sugar servers when they were tarnished and needed to be polished again. Since morning, the sky had been cloudy, but now at mid-afternoon, the clouds had grown much thicker and darker. Earlier in December we had gotten a little snow. Several forty-degree days had melted most of it, and the landscape was a combination of dun-colored grass, black tree branches and the russet color of certain oak leaves. Every year in December, Dad and I went on a Christmas tree expedition, and we were on our way now over to what we called our 'other place' to cut a tree. During the summer, I made frequent trips to the other place, a second farm my parents owned that was about a mile away, to help Dad with the haying or just to tag along when he checked on the corn or the oats or the soybeans. But after school started, I rarely went to the other place, and it always took me by surprise how different it looked in the winter. Instead of green alfalfa and timothy and clover waving in a warm south breeze, what had grown back after third crop was now brown stubble that trembled in the face of a north wind. The fields were strangely silent now, too, without the songs of meadowlarks and bobolinks, and the bobwhite quail which lived in the narrow section of woods lining the road. We were only about five minutes into our journey when Dad shifted the pickup truck down into first gear and then eased into the field driveway. The rutted track that ran along the edge of the hayfield was so bumpy that a merry jingling came from the glove compartment -- probably a few bolts and washers, along with a couple of wrenches and maybe a screwdriver or two. When you're a farmer, you never know when you might need a wrench or a screwdriver or a bolt. "Is it going to snow, Daddy?" I asked. Now that we had gotten past the trees lining the road, the sky had opened in front of us again. Dad leaned forward to look up through the windshield. "I'd say there's a pretty good chance," he replied. "How much?" My father shrugged. "Don't know. Maybe quite a bit. Wind's out of the east. And that usually means we