winter has returned, and brought with it alternating desires to play in the snow and to hide under blankets until summer. Sometimes the sameness of snow for months and winter's cold teeth tearing at your toes saps all sorts of creativity. It isn't as much fun to take a camera on a hike when you have to put on twenty-seven layers of wool first. There is no abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, all with a short shelf life and moments of ripeness before the next variety comes into season, to experiment with and coax out new flavors from.
Still, the light is softer. The hearth gathers family and friends. We come up with new ways to huddle together and share our love, cooking, giving gifts, forcing afternoon tea, if only to wrap our fingers around something hot. Still, too, "in winter, when everything is inanimate, living nature no longer covers the dead; in snowy outline the past can be read more clearly."
When the sky is cloudy at night, and snow falls, only children look up to catch the snowflakes on their tongues. When snow has fallen and the sky clear, we never marvel at the stars in the sky, only their reflections sparkle in the snow. Sometimes the sky is cloudy, the snow is falling, but it falls with all the clear brightness of stars.
At other times, "stars and trees meet and converse," the gloomy light shadowing through the branches, the falling snow streaking past windows bundled up against the cold.
There is a special hush to winter, with the sounds of life stilled while Persephone waits underground. The very air is still and silent, as though the smallest gust would whirl things away. There are no bright colors, yet color is visible in softened hues everywhere. The heather-blue of the sky. The deep green of the firs. The golden-purple that darkens underneath snow-covered eves. Even the browned grass-tops that hover above the snowy ground are beautiful. It often seems as though the shadows of those who had seen and lived and loved within hollows and dales flutter in the dancing snowflakes.
quotations from Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
"Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch." - Garrison Keillor
Still, the light is softer. The hearth gathers family and friends. We come up with new ways to huddle together and share our love, cooking, giving gifts, forcing afternoon tea, if only to wrap our fingers around something hot. Still, too, "in winter, when everything is inanimate, living nature no longer covers the dead; in snowy outline the past can be read more clearly."
When the sky is cloudy at night, and snow falls, only children look up to catch the snowflakes on their tongues. When snow has fallen and the sky clear, we never marvel at the stars in the sky, only their reflections sparkle in the snow. Sometimes the sky is cloudy, the snow is falling, but it falls with all the clear brightness of stars.
At other times, "stars and trees meet and converse," the gloomy light shadowing through the branches, the falling snow streaking past windows bundled up against the cold.
quotations from Doctor Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak
"Be well. Do good work. Keep in touch." - Garrison Keillor
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