The Deep of Winter

As a lifelong East Coaster I can be as prone to complain about the weather here as any of us.

It’s freezing.  Everything is dead.  I hate driving / shoveling this stuff.  Or my personal favorite: “I have not been warm since October.”

Truly, I hate being cold.  I’m very cat that way.  I’ll even occasionally sit Sphinx-like in front of the heater staring into its glowing red wires with a mystical look on my face.

September arrives in the East with a riot of spectacular color and Autumn related fun.  It’s crisp, clean, everything is colored in brilliant hues and there are hayrides, haunted and otherwise to attend to as well as pumpkin patch visits and the bounty of a warm Thanksgiving shared by family.  Then Christmas arrives with a blur of activity, color, food and merriment.

And then it all ends.  Ahead of us stretches three icy months of brown, white, grey and pale blue.  Scraping off a freezing cold vehicle to get to work and dreading any stretch of time spent outdoors.

This year my holiday decorations were neatly tucked away a mere week after Christmas.  My home was left clean, quiet and warm.  Unlike the normal seasonal defective disorder (as my Pastor calls it) that one might expect I felt only a sensation of nostalgic relief.

All the shopping, cooking, running, decorating, un-decorating and wrapping was completed for another year.  Now I could settle into the welcome stillness of a long winter ahead.  I knew there would be snuggling up on my sofa with my cat and a mug of hot chocolate to watch a movie.  Being tucked into a bed thick with pillows and coated in flannel beside the warmth of my husband as a chill, snow smelling breeze drifted in through an inch of open window.  Soon I would be waking after an ice storm to find my world thick with a coating of crystal glass; a transient beauty that can’t withstand the touch of the rising sun.  There will be a snow day when we tumble late from bed completely trapped in our house and I go outside to jump off my back steps into a deep pile of white, then tramping inside after shoveling to a bowl of hot soup that waits within.

Winter is still not my favorite season; I still prefer the bursting of life and brilliant flare of death that accompany Spring and Fall, but over the years I have learned to appreciate it’s homey comforts as well as it’s chilly splendors.