When Winter Comes

My winter comes in autumn.

It does not come with cold.  In even the lowest temps I cover everything but my eyes, venture out, and each time am delightfully reminded of my own warm-bloodedness.  We humans carry our own climates inside.

It does not come with snow.  That inevitable first dusting in October I pass by as if it were the summer fluff of cottonwoods.

Winter begins, for me, when the day becomes what's missing.  I can ignore the lessening light from June 21 to September 21, a sort of reverse spring, the amount still generous, bright early mornings and languid evenings perfect for watering gardens and mowing lawns--not enough time to sleep, really; enough light at enough height that I sneeze and become dizzy when I turn my face toward the sun.

But then the autumnal equinox rolls around, and the sun, when it hits me at all, hits me straight on, eye-to-eye, like a lover I loved so much I didn’t see it coming when he declared, “I’m going. I’m going.”  That is when my winter begins.  I mourn the loss of those hours, how each night it worsens, relentlessly.  There is no getting better, I know, until December 21st.   

Then, on the winter solstice, it’s spring as far as I’m concerned.  The world starts to open up again, each day a breath longer.  Springtails migrate in great masses over the snow on rogue warm days (I’ve seen them twice already!); in their dens, while hibernating, black bears give birth; chickadees begin their mating song.  Phenology fills my dreams:  sandhill cranes, red-winged blackbirds, eastern phoebes, spring peepers, wood frogs, hepatica, anemone, bloodroot all promise to come back like prodigal sons.  With snow, the world is blindingly bright in daytime and glows pleasantly under any moon over a quarter. Light.  Light.  Light! 

What gets me through the coldest season is not that famous line from Shelley’s ode--If winter comes, can spring be far behind?--but my own:  When winter comes in autumn, spring is twice as long.

Sandhill

My dog sat sniffing, her piercing predator’s gaze fixed on the valley, as if she had something important to do.  I didn’t get the memo.  So I lay on my back on snow that has melted and refrozen day after day to form a hard pack, snow shoes no longer necessary.  The temperature was rising now, in the evening, though the day had been cold.  In the distance, high up in the sky and out of my frame of reference I heard a sound so familiar I didn’t realize it was foreign, a sound that, according to the fossil record, is 2.5 million years old.  But I hadn’t heard it for a few months.

We only have eyes for one season.  It is hard to imagine summer in winter or winter in summer.  As love does, weather blinds us in intervals.

When the world is all icy-moon-white, green seems a wavelength undetectable to the human eye; swimming more like a latent memory of the womb than something that, in a few months, we could actually do.  How we long to move our naked arms through a pond or lake, hair flailing out around our heads like the stems of a sea-plant, and rise to the surface and dive down again as if between two worlds.  Did we dream this?  Or actually do it? 

Likewise, in summer, we can’t imagine how snow polka-dots the sky, how when it falls it doesn’t make a sound.

So what I heard was a sandhill crane.  It startled me into spring.  And as soon as it did, I forgot I had forgotten that crimson head, that throttling cry.  Winter was gone, like the time before birth.  It was spring, and always had been.