Here are some notes from my journals, Decembers 1990-2016. Some of them appeared  in the “Field Notes” section of The Windward Shore:

FIRST SNOW, barely an inch deep, and suddenly the world is pristine again. Climbed the hill out back and looked down on the land rolling beneath its new white coat and could see what lay beneath it. Like seeing muscles under the pelt of an animal. Could see the bones too, and the tendons and sinews.

*

Storm watch for tonight. First one of the season. About three inches on the ground already and heavy flakes falling. The monochromatic world seems ripe for storm. I’m ripe for it too.

*

It’s only December 6, but full winter already: bitter cold, a wind so strong it burrows through the walls. The furnace runs nonstop and the house won’t warm beyond 64 degrees, and my office so cold I’m working in a winter coat and wool hat – already a bitter black-and-white world. Shocked by all I’ve relearned so quickly: the penetrating cold, the burning touch of driven snow, the animal sounds of the wind.

*

Glenn says his house was so cold last night that he felt like he was being prepped for an organ transplant.

*

Last night I walked in the field in the moonlight (waxing, two days till full) and was surprised to see that every weed standing above the snow cast a shadow. I felt exposed and vulnerable, prey for owls.

*

This is the opposite of spring rain: winter drizzle, a degree or two short of freezing, the small drops driven on the wind and stinging my face. The road sheens dangerously. Glitter of sleet on the gravel shoulders; trees dark with wet limbs; sky the color of nothing. Should be a perfect day for discouragement, but my spirit soars.

*

Saw a sharp-shinned hawk in the front yard standing on a mouse it had just caught. It flew off to the woods across the road with the mouse limp in its talons, dangling like a pouch of tobacco. I didn’t think until later—too late—after fresh snow had fallen, that I should have looked for plunge marks in the snow.

*

Tonight the stars are close and bright and bonfires blaze on the hilltops. Cherry trees, bulldozed into piles as big as houses, doused with fuel oil, and ignited. I can see two of them from the front window. They blaze with the intensity of a furnace and trail streamers of sparks downwind. Even here, inside the house, I can smell the sweet smoke.

*

The harsh, deep, hopeless cold of full winter. The wind—dry, incessant, merciless, from the north—pries around the door and claws its way inside. Two electric heaters burn full time, and still my office is cold in every corner.

*

Twenty degrees this morning and another six inches of snow. Wraiths of sea-smoke on the bay.

*

All night awake. Trying with some long fingernail of the will to scratch some deep itch of the spirit.

*

Walking in moonlight. The snow is so deep now that Toby could make almost no headway. He bounded, rested with his belly deep in the snow, then bounded again. Finally he was so exhausted that the sat in the track of my snowshoes and watched as I went on without him. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him quit.

I could have walked for miles, but I didn’t want to leave the dog behind, so I decided to go only as far as the shadowline made by the hill. Once I stepped past the boundary between shadow and light the moonlight lay so bright around my legs that my shadow strode along beside me.

When I returned to him Toby ran in circles of gratitude in the snow. The rest of the way home he followed so closely in my tracks that he kept stepping on the backs of my snowshoes.

*

Cold is the default condition of the universe.

*

When I’m out there it doesn’t feel like “out there.”

*

Wallace Stevens, in “The Snow Man,” writes that a “mind of winter” is required before one can see the snow and frost and “the junipers shagged with ice” and not project a correlation with human misery and other human things. Only a cold, rational intellect knows that he is a nothing who perceives the winter landscape and sees the “Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

When we know that we are nothing and that nothing permeates everything, our humanity kicks in. From loneliness, awe, and perplexity comes compassion.

*

We need more time outside. Five minutes walking in winter air—the air cold and clean as mountain water—and our faces are bright with joy. We look like children again.

*

Twenty degrees this morning and another six inches of snow. Wraiths of sea-smoke on the bay.

*

A white Christmas after all. Five inches, light and fluffy. Very cold. This morning a sun pillar shot up ahead of the rising sun and lit the hill behind Carolus’s in pink alpenglow. As I watched, it crept downhill until everything around me was brilliant with pink then golden light.

-End-