All is wet and foggy as I come home early to put on my coat and hat and snow shoes and grab my jerrycan to walk around the back 40 gathering sap and smells and reliving inchoate memories of being so happy in the woods or the back yard or out on the lake wherever I could just stop and be in the wetness of it all.

I walk around and check buckets and sniff and inhale deeper and deeper as I slow down and slow down some more to just try to make it last a little longer.

The cool rain stops the sap so if I am lugging a large burden it is also very light and of course next thing I know I am down at the bog on my knees trying not to fall into the drink while taking pictures of submerged icebergs tickled by swift little currents of melting ice and snow from upstream in the bog and redolent with beaver.

Eventually I notice it has started raining hard again and now it’s trudging up the hill with the jerrycan clanking against my legs and large snowshoes flopping and sinking deeply again into now very rotten but still 16 inches of snow — and slowing, slowing, and smelling and inhaling life itself even as much if it seems still dormant but not for long now. And once again I wonder what makes that smell of wet woods and Dutch greenhouse at Christmastime which is so wet and so peaty but not al all earthy and above all the freshest there is save perhaps the smell of the laundry dried in the bright winter sunshine.

The warmer currents and water molecules in the air today are carrying smells that were there yesterday too and, as water drops are wont to, enlarging pretty much everything so they make much of the amount of contact between me and the air in my nostrils this time, easing the transfer of whatever it is that makes smell. By twenty-five times does water conduct temperature faster than air and I bet really everything else that it carries. The water multiplier you might call it.

The water multiplier has my vote. In the middle of the summer when you are smelling the mildew at the bottom of the closet in this humid and cool clime that is not such a great idea but right now it is the best it might possibly be.

And as I look around me I see what is being multiplied. It is wet black bark and melting snow and the wet maple leaves emerging and themselves falling apart and releasing more of themselves into the environment and in the air with every passing second, and it is the wet twigs and wet pine needles and wet spruce needles and wet light green of pieces of lichen that fell out of a tree sometime this winter when the wind blew ferociously across the bog and up the slope from the north. It is the wet mouse turds and a molecule or two of the dead owl and the drops on the hairs on the wet buds that haven’t started engorging yet but soon will. It is the water on the stone and the green of the moss that has woken up and is sucking in the rain drops it’s been missing for months now since it last really rained in late December.

It is my wet hat and my wet self that longs to just fall down in this snow and be one with it all it if it were only possible, in the same inchoate way new lovers wish to be inside and outside and entirely of each other.

Three more trees to go with the light fading a little I find a spot where rain runs off the roof into a puddle in the ice and drips in my neck as I desperately try to catch that one moment when the drop falls and bounces back up.