Winter’s white sky is a blank page today. Bare-branched trees supplicate the still, pale sky, as if calling down snow.
Anything, or nothing at all, could happen on a day with a sky like this. It seems to be waiting to be written upon by even one lone sparrow’s wing.
Out the window, I see a thin sugar of snow and a gray, unvarying light. The sky droops toward the ground, softening the edges of unlit houses. Branches wave in the north wind.
We live under a flyway traveled by flocks of crows. They call to one another. They journey in silence. Mornings, I watch them fly southwest across the city to their feeding grounds; as the day fades, they wing back to their roosting grounds, somewhere northeast of here.
Neither of their destinations is known to me. As I loaded groceries into the car in the co-op parking lot yesterday, I caught sight of the crow river. I had a quick urge to follow them, see where it is that they go.
But crows follow their own paths, where cars cannot drive; in this case, diagonally, across the city’s strict NS/EW street grid.
Instead, I simply witnessed their marvelous, murderous flight … and the crows preserved their iridescent mysteries.
January is the time of winter times three — when solar winter, meteorological winter, and astronomical winter1 combine all of their powers of ice, darkness and stillness to show us what hardship and struggle is like, if we did not already know it.
It’s as if winter’s a mirror, a projection screen. This appearance of blankness, or emptiness, is ripe for metaphor. We’ve all heard of winter personified as fierce crone … as a mythological descent into the Underworld … as a season of age and endings … as a time to sow seeds that can only germinate through exposure to winter’s long cold days (this works on two levels, factual and metaphorical).
Here is a new one: Winter is a 5,000-page novel I begin to read every year in late November, and will not finish until March or April. Its genre: Gothic fiction, complete with ruined castles, prison dungeons and a heroine in peril.2
Only, unlike in the case of my fictional heroine, I am really the only one who can save myself from falling into a dark place. Winter can feel annihilating when your inner landscape too closely mirrors the outer one — bleak, blank, empty.
There usually comes at least one time each winter, after days of clouds, when I can feel myself beginning to circle downward. One of my coping mechanisms, for fear of getting sucked under by this low-level depression, has always been to escape into fiction, where, for a little while, I can inhabit a different reality than the one I am living. I thought this winter I’d try something different, so I’m meeting with a therapist in hopes of dealing with the winter blues in a more productive way, and I think it will help.
But I still read, of course.
Winter this year has been eerily quiescent. I keep feeling as if it is waiting to spring out at me from around a corner.
A couple of days after beginning this letter, the winter crone yanked her thick gray cloak from the sky, the temperature dropped into the teens, and a face-biting wind blew in — as ever — from the northwest.
I walk through the local cemetery, scuffing through a skim of dry snow that shivers and scatters like sand. The sun shines through air that feels like sublimated ice. In spite of my inner dramas about winter, I discover, for what must be the thousandth time, that I actually like the cold. Within reason.
After living here a lifetime, cold feels somehow…normal. Even reassuring. This is what winter here is supposed to feel like, and, as the past two months have shown, the cold may be something we can no longer take for granted, even in a state bordering Canada.
No days of intense cold? No snow? No ice? No snow-shoeing, cross-country skiing, skating, ice-fishing, ice-sailing, ice hockey, polar plunges or the enchantment of walking on a whole lake of water that has become ice? Unimaginable, until very recently.
Winter brings a realization: I have missed this face-freezing experience, especially during the ever-increasing heatwaves of summer.
I’ve missed this scouring purity, as if your skin is being ice-blasted, while your blood sings beneath its surface. It is this living quality of the air: light, clear, clean, cold. I wished for this air during all of those Canadian and Californian wildfire days last year, when visible smoke burned our throats and tiny particulates settled into our lungs; when breathing felt heavy and labored. Breathing, the most essential of acts for living beings, became one more thing to worry about, in a world of things to worry about.
Maybe I knew it years ago, without knowing that I knew?
That the cold, too, has a presence and a spirit. It has a wild voice that I have heard every long winter of my life. An insistent voice, that pierces any barrier I fashion, sings me to sleep, shakes me awake. Even coldness can be a companion.
There are rituals that belong only to winter. Here is one. Pull the wild, elemental air into your lungs. Let the new-made wind cleanse away whatever is keeping you from being fully alive. For a moment or a lifetime, stop resisting winter and that which you cannot control … and let go.
Solar winter, that period with the least total daylight, stretches from early November through January. Meteorological winter, the coldest months, lasts December through February. Astronomical winter begins on the winter solstice and ends with the spring equinox.
I really like Gothic fiction. Early Gothic fiction and deep winter actually share some characteristics. According to Wikipedia, both have “[a] Setting [that] typically includes … ruined buildings [Carmine’s analog: cars abandoned in snow drifts] which stand as proof of a previously thriving world which is decaying in the present…. The atmosphere is typically claustrophobic…. Other characteristics, regardless of relevance to the main plot, can include sleeplike and deathlike states.” Wikipedia
It has been snowing for hours here after many days of extreme below freezing temperatures. I love winter and snow and icicles, and as a native Southern Californian, every winter is a new experience in the Idaho Panhandle. We've lived here 15 years, and we are both so happy to have moved from one international border to the other in the far north. Having never experienced the changing seasons until we fled San Diego, our life here is almost like the joy of new childhood experiences.
I feel much the same about winter....equal parts dread and delight. This is a gorgeous piece of writing...the winter landscape has come alive in your words. xo