An Ode to the Cold

In fragments, just like winter

Happy New Year from New England where it doesn’t look like this:

A child’s lost mitten, snug and frosty on a fence post. Icy sparkle across the mouse-brown grass.

What’s left of the year’s growth - tilting sunflower stalks and drifts of maple leaves covering the garden beds. The barest wisp of milkweed fluffing out of its pod.

Killer sunsets.

Long nights, bright stars, our words clouds of steam.

And too:

Rain. Mud. A blank sky. Is it April, October, January? The frosted days replaced by wet ones, a glitch in the rhythm. This winter, we’re almost dormant but not quite.

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In December, on the solstice, I knelt into the dirt, sunk my spade four inches down, and dug hole after hole after hole. There be worms! I planted 40 daffodil bulbs.

On the shortest, darkest day of the year, the first day of winter, the ground was still soft. Why?

Burrowing bulbs into the dirt, asking them to rest underground before they poke through in the spring: It’s hope. I could hope that everything will go as planned, that a cycle set by the earth and the sun will stay true. I could hope that the lilacs follow the daffodils, the crabapples follow the lilacs, the thaw follows the freeze. I could hope that the squirrels, who haven’t settled down for the season yet, won’t dig up my flowers-in-waiting for dinner.

I could. But aren’t we holding hope lightly these days? Instead I’ll wonder how we’ll adapt while we witness winter eroding. When rain falls instead of snow, I’ll try to release my expectations about what winter should be like. I’ll trudge out there, to witness.

And when the cold does come, I’ll ask it to stay but try not to cling. It goes away every year, anyway.

But really: Give it to me.

Give me the crystalline air, the fractured frozen puddles, the fresh snow blanket and the crusty remains, the hat with the fat pompom! Give me good ice and pretty white ice skates and maple sap lines in wintered-over woods. Give me a hill to sled down and a child’s reddened hand to hold.

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Because in the cold, we make our own heat. Wendell Berry says it well:

The Cold

How exactly good it is
to know myself
in the solitude of winter,

my body containing its own
warmth, divided from all
by the cold; and to go

separate and sure
among the trees cleanly
divided, thinking of you

perfect too in your solitude,
your life withdrawn into
your own keeping

to be clear, poised
in perfect self-suspension
toward you, as though frozen.

And having known fully the
goodness of that, it will be
good also to melt.