Relay: The Soft Season

I have a love-hate relationship with winter. Every so often I mull about moving to an always-temperate place, someplace where momentum doesn’t get lost for half a year, where my outward self, the one that flings open the door and steps outside barely awake, stays active all year and the half-outside life I adopt during the season — and the swimming — never ends. 

But then winter comes, and there are so many things, a list that surprises me: the play of light and shadow on the bedroom wall on a weekend afternoon; reading in bed under the skylight; the torpor of warmth and well-being when settled under a blanket after being outside in the cold; the creak of the trees, those ancient Ent-beings with their gray wrinkled trunks, when it is supercold and there is not even a frost-breath of a breeze but they are moving ever so slightly, and their molecules are so cold, constricted, sap so slow — the science of it, I really should know — that just the flexibility required to stand pushes a deep-wood sigh out through their surface. 

I don’t do the transition well: There’s too much to do and the cold sneaks up on me. How many years have I bought fall bulbs, and been out there as, or even after, the ground was frozen, trying to augur a hole and get them in? Used to be, I’d set Halloween as a benchmark for getting it done. Then Thanksgiving, then my birthday, a short time later. 

This year, I didn’t buy bulbs at all. And out there, under a dusting of snow, is a tarp covered with a pile of crinkly brown leaves, just a dollop of all the others I never — not yet — raked up. 

It’s January; I’m ready to forget about it. I’ve got most of the terra-cotta pots in so they don’t freeze and thaw and crack and, I think, the outdoor shower is off. Hoses away. 

All of that’s a burden, in the days when the door is shutting on the pleasure days — the days of a bay dip after work, of some hours lying on sand dreaming and writing, of the soft and gentle air as I lie suspended in the hammock. 

And yet — there’s a gentleness about winter, I’ve got to admit. There is time in winter, or at least at first I think there is. A release from the obligation to be out, to do. Much less bustle in town, itself a blessing and a more and more critical antidote to a longer and longer, and more annoying, “high season.” 

I love the bare treescape best, I think — the exposed shape of charcoal branch bones against a vaporous sky. It’s close, though, because I do adore the lacy spring trees, the curl of unfurling leaves, the frilly buds and blossoms of pear and cherry and apple. But I’m not a Sally Sunshine kind of girl, so though I love the nascent look of spring, the promise — the summer green is nice, but too blatant to stir me — it’s the winter trees I love. 

I’m enamored right now; not inclined to write about the hate part of the equation. Winter’s been going along . . . a bit of snow, and then a thaw, some bracing air but nothing too hard to take. 

It’s the lockdown I hate —- the underside of the closing in, the shutting down that I savor. Long weeks of ice and snow and trouble, winter toil, trouble getting around, trouble getting to work, trouble getting the car cleared off, trouble, now, making sure that I don’t fall and get hurt. Those weeks or even months when one more challenge, one more trial, will sail me right over the edge.

That winter, though, when for ages I never got farther into the driveway than the edge of the road, and followed a barely shoveled path in my snow boots, dragging my bags and bundles to and from work, that winter on Valentine’s Day, there was this: a heavy snow falling, but I was still headed out, meeting some other singles for a dose of friend-love and dinner. In my big puffy coat, lower legs stuck crookedly into the snow like unsteady sticks, I fell slowly onto my side on top of the snowbank and it held me gently there. Big flakes hit my face and the stars were bright ice chips in the sky. Wrapped up and comfortable, I stayed a minute, long enough for the gift of a fox, soft-footed on the covered road and eye level, running by. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor at The Star.