photo credit: Winter Oak Leaves Free Photos
On that period of "time held captive between December and March..." *
When first snow appears, when nights are snappy and crisp, air tight, clear...without an iota of pollen or dust or mold.... not an insect, not a molecule of anything but air in the air....with every leaf off, with the needles on the evergreens holding great dollops of white and the skeletons of the surrounding trees drawn in snow...with the brown of the sleeping lawn finally covered in a white down blanket...with little tufts of the garden poking up here and there – heads not quite ready to bend down to the mounds of snow at their feet....with a full or partial moon shining on all of this and etching it on my retinas.....every year I think, "this is the most beautiful sight in the world." Could I give up this beauty – not forgive the earth its need to freeze over and renew itself? No, no, impossible.
Would Robert Frost have written "stopping by woods on a snowy evening" if he had lived anywhere except in New England? And where would we be if he had not?
In the most bitter weather, when I wait and wait to go out and shovel out my paths, when I worry for the feral cats and hope they are in their shelters, when the birds need suet and seed, when the lawn guy who's the snow plow guy in the Winter is long gone and pushed the snow from the end of my driveway...when the warmth of the house is shattered by tiny drafts and cold floors and I am forced to don socks and even shoes...when my joints ache and refuse to bend...the Winter cold is still warmed by the years of happiness it afforded me as a child, as a young adult and even as an older one.
What is it about snow? I rather it snowed than the earth lay bare and frigid – that emptiness I find terribly depressing and dark and unforgiving. Nasty. Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome is cast in the bleak Winter of Massachusetts and paints the picture of what it feels like to function in such a place. For a Yankee, Winter is as valuable as any other seasons if only for the contrast of dark to light or (near) death to life.
But still, brrrrrrr. as the Earth warms unnaturally and our Winters become less severe...there is a part of me that thinks...great! Is that terrible or what? That same part of me eats too many cookies at one sitting, spends money on extravagances that lie in waste or concocts all sorts of other behavior for which I am not proud. I will work tirelessly to effect change to reverse Global Warming (hey, I just bought a hybrid car); I'm a good Al Gore soldier....but in the meantime, is it so awful that my neighbors and I enjoy a little less shoveling, a few less blizzards, and save a little money by using a little less fuel to stay warm?
One's personal emotional contrasts are none-the-less dramatic as black is to white. Can we record the storm more clearly from the day the sun shines or must we be cold to understand snow?
photo credit: leaf in snow, travel.webshots.com
*(again quoted from friend Peter)
1 comment:
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