O California

 I'm going back to Minnesota where sadness makes sense    Danez Smith

O California, don't you know the sun is only a

god

if you learn to starve for him? I'm bored with 

the ocean

I stood at the lip of it, dressed in down, praying

for snow

I know, I'm strange, too much light makes me 

nervous

at least in this land where the trees always

bear green.

I know something that doesn't die can't be

beautiful.

Have you ever stood on a frozen lake,

California?

The sun above you, the snow & stalled sea--a

field of mirror

all demanding to be the sun too, everything

around you

is light & it's gorgeous & if you stay too long it

will kill you

& it's so sad, you know? You're the only warm 

thing for miles

& the only thing that can't shine.

Winter stole in when we briefly looked away at Christmas, a gray ghost of fog and light rain that slowly cooled your blood.  The squirrels and cardinals have been in a flurry, scooping the seeds from the bird feeders into their beaks and mouths. Hibernation--should we say traditionally--allows some animals to survive winter without migrating to Florida, like some people do, sitting in their small lanais, dipping their feet in the tepid water, watching the alligators creep by and giving them the side-eye. Hibernating animals slow down, their metabolism slows too; they survive on stored energy reserves in their bodies, or stashed food in their dark caves and warrens. Here in the Northeast, we layer on undershirts and woolen socks and wrap our heads in scarves to prevent the heat from leaking out into the cold.  But we also return, must return, again and again, to the home fires.  Our soft bodies are not made for winter, our fur is constructed.

Winter moves in, cold air slipping in through the eaves and the floorboards, and the windows are bitter cold to the touch.  I learned a way of thinking about winter from Laura Ingalls Wilder.  Laura and Mary and perhaps Carrie too sleep together in their unheated bedroom, "in the still cold under the frosty-nailed roof," waking to ice crackling on their quilt. In The Long Winter, the children walk home from school in a blizzard in which they can hardly see--Laura's eyelids were bleeding from the snow scratching them by the time she made it to the cabin.  

This is a photo of a train stuck in the snow in 1881, the ferocious winter about which Laura wrote.

"There were no more lessons.  There was nothing in the world but cold and dark and work and coarse brown bread and winds blowing."  This is a human animal hibernating.  And this is the resignation with which so many of us greet winter, despite the fact that we, oh my readers, are unlikely to run out of heat, or light, or food, like Laura's family did in that particular winter.  I'm drawn to this family because they are not freezing trying to cut through icebergs on a distant sea, or climbing to reach elevations at which humans cannot breathe.  They are trying to get through winter on the plains with very few resources but their own unfurred bodies.

O California, the poet gently scolds.  Do we feel a sense of accomplishment for wintering over? For bearing the shortened days, the long winter nights, the shivering walk with the dog out to the bog where, this morning, the ponds were beginning to freeze over and the mud was frozen, which made it simpler for me to walk.  The air was cold on my cheeks, and my hood kept me warm, and I felt strong when I returned from the walk, a different kind of return than from the sweltering walks of July, or the mosquitoed hikes of the spring.  By doing something that takes resilience, I felt more resilient.  That could be a through-line for the winter.

We have all been wintering for some time, metaphorically.  Behind doors, behind masks, covid stretches on into another year of worry and fear.  Many are venturing out, because we can't bear to live in perpetual winter--the economy won't take it, our mental health demands company, we are weary of introspection and the brown bread we learned to make with glee two years ago in March.  Are we practicing hygge or are we suffering from cabin fever?  Shall we hang lights in the darkness and set aside preserved lemons, shall we finish those sweaters we began to knit? I have a set of activities that pull me through darkness, both internal and external, and they are shockingly simple: deep breathing, short but regular stints of meditation, walks with the dog (when that experience changed from a chore to something existentially necessary must have happened sometime between middle school and the arrival of my own first dog, but it has only been enhanced by the relative disappearance of babies in my life, which made taking a half hour for a brisk solitary walk with the dog as easy as a Tahitian vacation), reading and reading, some writing, and as much time with my family and circle of friends as I can have. I can't really recommend them to you--it's not a prescription, and you of course have your own beloveds and nesting plans.

I would be remiss if I did not dwell on baking for a moment.  My sister gave me a marvelous kitchen machine--not for the fainthearted--it's an Anskarum stand mixer and it comes with all manner of accessories that allow you to grind and blend and whisk and juice.  But the kneading is a joy.  I made something called Toast Bread for my first go at it.

You just slice the loaves and pop them in the freezer for toast in the morning.  With salted butter and jam.

My eldest son got married three days after Christmas.  I am deeply, deeply grateful to have been here for this day of beauty and to see the looks of pure love and hopefulness on the faces of my son and his truly beautiful bride.  Kanika's parents traveled from India for the wedding--this has been a trip so long in the making because of Covid, and we seized this time for the occasion.  They plan a big wedding in India sometime soon--perhaps I will be there for that as well.  They got married at the labyrinth that all of the children built.  There was the usual scrabbling to make it all come together--did you think of napkins? Are paper towels impolite? Oh, here are the napkins, and so on and so forth, and of course Covid affected the day, and of course there is all the strangeness of a truly modern family--mothers and fathers and gay people and people from India and step-mothers and girlfriends and it all just wrapped up into something extraordinary in which I truly felt the expansion of our family to include Kanika and her parents as if it was a physical change that alighted upon me as they took their vows.

Oh, and I lied above.  The toast bread is the first bread I made with the new mixer, but Avery, Zach and I made the wedding cake with the new mixer too.  People, the cake was delicious and that made it a wedding cake to remember in and of itself. This cake really took a village.

Katherine May, in her memoir Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times, encourages the "active acceptance of sadness." She is not equating winter with sadness, but she is considering periods of life when you feel cut off from the world, or blocked from progress, or something of an outsider as analogous to what we do in winter. Wintering, as she terms it, requires strategy, by hibernating, or retreating, or letting your life slow down as the metabolism of those hibernating bears does. "Doing these deeply unfashionable things--slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting--is a radical act now, but it is essential."

My time with cancer has been something of a wintering in this sense.  Time has expanded--I feel small in the universe, not fated, not meant to have something so exalted as a fate, but I also feel I have a place, as much as any bear with its heavy brown fur in a cave does, as much as a fossil, as much as a newborn baby named Remy who was born into my big, adoring family last month. My time is not about progress exactly, save progress towards death, and I don't mean that in a maudlin way.  I'm not trying to achieve anything at work.  I'm not counting on a particular day in the future.  I have retreated from a busy world of cities and lunch dates and deadlines and deliverables.  But I'm not noble for that anymore than I am noble for walking into the woods alone with the dog this gray morning.  I miss the headiness of all that outer living, but I am living as intentionally as I can (which is not a dreamy act--it's a vicarious living through all that my loved ones are bearing (the clinical work, the new job, the move to a new city, the baseball try-outs, the covid, the covid testing, the work deadlines), it's the re-engagement with history and trauma and dashed expectations that mark holidays, the flawed and persistent love, the worries about prescription costs and radiation therapy, and of course the beautiful smile my son bestowed upon his bride when she managed her way down the footpath to the labyrinth, the confidences of my other older son, the late-night frosting of cakes and hiding of extraneous objects so that our home looked clean and sleek with my eldest daughter, the flurries of texts and missives with my quarantined daughter, Elijah crying when he watched his brother get married, Asher asking me if I am okay over and over again, every time I cough or falter, my parents holding me the other day in the kitchen over quiche and tears and old dogs, my sister's rational, deep, abiding love and tolerance for my idiocies, my brother's daughters who have entered my life as astonishing adults, my wife heating up the heating pad over and over for my aching shoulder, the look my middle-aged dog gets when he even senses walk, even though I know better than to say it out loud, my grounded therapist who is playing drums in small villages in Africa, my dear friends from my support group, as we all breathe in sharply as the year turns over to another one which holds impossible things, the ending of Harlem Shuffle, which was wonderful-- and you know how skeptical I am about endings--it's that new baby), and I appreciate the idea of wintering as hibernation, as retreat, as self-care, as an acceptance of a world, that, depending on climate change, depending on blizzards, depending on generators, may, for a day or three in this actual winter, after the bread and the milk and the salt and the plow, be a time for early evenings of long sleeps, fires built against the seeking cold, brown bread with butter.  

I know something that doesn't die can't be beautiful.