Well, there are only so many words I can lay down on paper or, for that matter, speak out loud about my thoughts on winter.
In the end, they boil down to NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
And still winter comes,
Already sliding in disguised as fall, dressed in yellows and the occasional red-orange that I love. Masquerading as hearty wind and the grass and weeds we allow to bake brown and the snow we see from afar catching in the clear-cuts high up our mountains. Here, but not yet, not down HERE yet. Here, even as the light and sky of these days becomes spun gold—Tuscany under the Big Sky.
In the summer, on the days that I sit and sweat and wish for a breeze, these words come easily to my lips: I love summer. I love the heat.
They are prayer and wish and conviction. Celebration and love letter. I go to bed glad for no covers, glad to let a cheap fan blow enough soft air over me to float into the night at rest. I ask the days to stretch out, to linger. I ask the robins to postpone their evening benediction for a few minutes.
But it’s the season now where I turn up the thermostat a bit and begin debating which windows to leave open, whether I can trade the storm door’s bright patch of light for the cold that slips through the glass like cream and manifests as condensation. Whether to add the extra little blanket that Simon favors for close-contact sleeping and then still get up an hour later to toast a rice bag around which I can curl my body. Whether to give in to socks.
I scan ahead in the forecast for that unseasonably hot day in which to play-pretend summer, drink up the last of my root beer floats. And then note the night that drops into the 20s that will spell death even for geraniums and marigolds.
You’ll mark how much energy I spend in idle, fraught anticipation, in dread. How many of those carefully harbored summer minutes I now squander in wish.
And these October signs in no way constitute winter—the winter that brings dark at 4 and holds us in its grip until 9, the first big snow that arrives determined to spend the whole season here, to be the ugly black rind that melts last, the months in which all travel—foot or car–is risky.
So one more winter let me try this game. Hold me to it, will you?
Starting now, let me begin my seasonal observations with: I love winter. I thrive on cold and ice. I welcome these days of hibernation.
Let me make this my creed. Let me make a ritual of toasting dark nights and thanking the universe for the bright, colorful nest I inhabit, for a cat who considers it an honor to sleep beside me, for warmth in every conceivable dimension, for books that transport me to heat and sun, to centuries and continents so exotic I vacation on their shores.
And see whether, with sufficient resolve, this little aging engine can declare her way peaceably and gladly up and over the mountain of winter. I think I can . . . . ©
