I love Winter.
This is an unpopular opinion. During my years in DC, people shuddered in horror when I enthused about snow. Forecast an inch of snow and stand back: you just unleashed a stampede on grocery stores. Parking lots jammed, milk, bread and TP flying off the shelves. Here in western PA folks are less flappable about winter, and a good deal more capable of managing it. But they aren’t any happier. My winter rapture puts me squarely in the minority.
I love Winter. I love the hush of a thick snowfall, seeing my breath. I love the sound the wind makes moving bare branches, such different music from the leafy summer forest. I love ice: the crystalline and watery colors, the cracks that let you see its thickness, and the sounds!
This morning’s temperature hovers just below freezing. The watery sunlight illuminates the neighborhood houses, each one trailing a plume of white from its chimney. The light climbs up the mountainside, now in its winter color: part orange, part violet, part earthy brown. When brushed with the sun the orange shines through.
When I was a kid winter was more – we lived with the rhythm of it. Splitting and hauling wood, coal. Sledding, ice fishing. Our house so small if we wanted to play we had to go outside. That meant bundling up: insulated boots, long johns, flannel-lined jeans, down-filled jackets and vests if not snow suits. Never, ever, without gloves, your scarf and a hat.
This was deadly serious. A beloved neighbor died in a snowdrift when I was a teen. She fell and couldn’t get up, her husband had fallen asleep. And more than once I nearly fell through the river ice in a dangerous location, the cold water rushing beneath the ice a close brush with mortality,
But I’ve skated on canals for miles, and chased fish under crystal clear ice more than a foot thick. I’ve hiked in the snowbound hills, and found deer sleeping under the boughs, weighed down with snow, of an enormous pine. I’ve melted snow on the wood stove for bath water, cooked on the hearth.
There’s a delicate beauty about Winter. It’s understated- the subtle, limited palette, all greys and whites, makes any hint of hue all the more radiant. Think of the beech tree leaves, hanging on when all the other leaves have gone: in midwinter sunlight they are luminous apricot. Or those times when the deep snow shadows are extraordinarily blue.
“There are only two ways to live your life.
― Albert Einstein
One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”
I read somewhere that the stars will go on doing star things no matter what I do. They don’t care. Yet they blaze with a breathtaking beauty and offer it to me.
This time of year all holiday lights go up little by little on many of our houses. Each dark evening there are more displays. Here a simple string of lights, there a splendid bunch of inflatables, or that house with every shrub and window ablaze.
We have all been given potential for joy, but not its guarantee. The world turns. We cycle from cold to warm, from light to dark, from youth to age. We’re blessed, we’re grief stricken, we’re lost, we’re illuminated.
Art-Spirit-Nature 