Winter is a peculiar time of year for me, equal parts welcomed and loathed. Welcomed for the stillness that it brings to anywhere that isn't urban, loathed for the forced introspection that it inflicts. I think that I liked winter better when I was younger, and hadn't yet acquired the entire chorus of clamoring neuroses that exploit winter's quiet to shout at me. I don't mean that winter reduces me to a Gollum-pale hermit safely holed up in my room with blankets nailed over the windows and muttering to myself. But there is something about the season that lends itself to a focusing inward, which is where all of the stuff that needs therapizin' hangs out.
Now that I don't live in the hated city, the essence of the season is even more apparent. Last night I walked out onto the crusted snow that covers our little patch of earth, made blue-white and luminous by the splotch of moon high in the sky. There's something about snow and moon together that I find soothing...the moonlight is softly thown back up into the air, and misty plumes of breath glow in the darkness like spirits. The crunch crunch of my feet in the week-old snow was intensely satisfying. I walked back, to the fence, and peered up at the moon, the bare trees, the lighted second-floor window of my office, and the semi-dilapidated shed that I'll have to get around to doing something with someday so that I can put a kiln in it.
Later, I toddled around for awhile on my bicycle in the town darkness, which revealed just how out of shape I've become since I moved...I went from 16 miles on the bike a day to zero, and put on all the weight I'd lost and then some, probably in part due to Paxil's wonderful Puffing Effect. But for just a moment, as I looped past the snowlit expanse of the golf course near my house where I can't fly my kites, I felt that youthful wintery fascination again: quiet, solitary, and inward, but not the kind of inward that feels huddled and sad. The stillness felt good; the cold wind-forced tears on my cheeks were bracing. For a moment, all was right with world, and I didn't care about terrorists or war or politicians.
And with that, I finally put my finger on what's seems so off about my writings of late, which is that they're not off at all. It's not the season for being punditious and clever. It's the season for shortened days and stillness. It's the season for sleepy Solstice rites and icicles. And so I'll not resist the change. I'll write about snow and moonlight and night air, and leave the punditry to those of a more fixed nature.
Funny... I was almost moved to write last night about the winter sky just after the sun had set. It turns the most remarkable shade of deep blue that I only see in the winter. And the three-quarter moon, in this perfectly clear sky, was as bright as a spotlight. I thought it was the kind of moon that would light up a dark countryside. Then I wished I was in the country, because with a sky like that, you gotta have stars... but you can't see most of them in the city.
Which reminds me, I'd like to see the Aurora Borealis again sometime soon.
Posted by: Terry | December 18, 2002 05:15 PM