Winter

Then winter fell. First came some raw frost and snow. A toddling start. Then the fierce wind braced itself in the North. All that was water in the Peel, ponds and ditches, the drain besides the road, morasses, gullies and puddles, immediately became a hard floor of blue and black ice. Frost darted off into the ground. Peat cutting soon ended all around. Some of the Peel workers were put to work cutting wood in the municipal forests. There the axe sounded through de thin frozen air. But many others, the workers who cut peat for the farmers and who ferried the sods, the diggers and straighters from the company, the loaders and unloaders of the barques, they crawled in front of their stoves at home. There they sat in a corner, their feet on the rungs of their chairs and their chins in their unemployed hands, there they sat being poor and listening to the whipping whistles of the north wind; it was bad. …

Winter over the Peel. The workless workers, who are sitting behind their stoves, hear how the stove pipe starts to roar in the chimney. A sudden loud voice with broadly drawn whirring attacks. A sharp snow beats the windows. Across the wide Peel expanse the snowstorm drives. In the dashes of the snow, in the violence of the gusts a martyred pine stands, dancing besides the snowy road. The storm is roaring. The sod stacks are standing lost and away behind the snowbank. Across the slippery ice of the ponds and ditches the snow runs her rustling race. The snow like feathers sweeps bare the ice and amasses in a bend, heaps itself up to a wall against the steep edge of an excavation and settles in the ice on the deep wagon trails in the road. Towards the horizon all is one white swirl. One distant whiteness in the pounding wind. Beyond all roads, behind all hedges, from the bosom of the Earth the storm gathers its strength and unites with the force of the low skies. …

At night the stars bloom over the Peel. At night the stars rustle high above the small rooftops in the earth. In front of the lowland, where the silence of the Peel lies sunken, the endless height of the night stands straight, spread in the twinkling, in the clear falling of the stars in a dance towards the depths of the darkness of the Peel and along the white stripes across the sky, in which the swarming stars turn in their shivering stream. Above a roof a low chimney rises, that chimney sits there cowering short and deep, the smoke rising from it clear and translucent. The sharp smoke of the peat fire, the stars play in it, glistering through it. The house below lies hidden in the Earth.

Antoon Coolen, 1930 - Peelwerkers