If Winter Be The Color Of Our Days

From A Winter Tide by Robert Nathan

 

A Treetop outside our house

It would be wiser, since we live in fear,

To use our sorrows to correct our ways.

If winter be the color of our days,

Then learn of winter to be still and clear.

It’s cold here.  Mid-Atlantic natives find this amusing, but this California Girl thinks that a high of 42° is cold.  Dwight and I geared up with below the knee down coats, extra-warm daily walking shoes, a selection of gloves for different purposes and waterproof boots to slog through slush and snow.  And warm scarves.  In my former life scarves were a fashion accessory.  Here, scarves save my ears and throat from painful chill. 

The creek nearby

Emily tells me that the real cold comes in February when the ground has frozen, because then even the sunshine won’t warm your feet.  Oh my. I recall reading a newspaper essay years ago in which the East Coast writer, lamenting the dirty, sloggy snow she had been shuffling through for weeks, asserted that California had no February.  Wrong!  I shouted at the newspaper – wrong!  We do have February, and it’s filled with early daffodils and a heavy harvest of greens from the winter garden.

It’s only the beginning of January, but I’m beginning to pace myself for that other February, the one the essayist was talking about.   Here’s the surprise:  with the right clothes and a little imagination, it’s pretty nice so far. Today the sky is blue with a few puffy clouds, the wind is quiet, and if I stand in just the right spot, the sun is warm.  The bare branches of the urban woods we live in are startlingly dark against the sky, and the cardinals – so new to me – are reminders of bright life.

Among my cold weather challenges is learning to be okay with going out in the cold.  The cold season in the San Joaquin Valley is so short that a brief hibernation is easy.  Here, if I stay in the house on cold days I’d stay in the house for a very long time.  And even that might be okay except for the other weather front in this picture – the toddler tornado.

Can you picture him being still? 

Chubby cuteness at exactly 2 months old

“Still and Clear,” as in the poem, is a lovely and true idea, but it does not lend itself to a housebound toddler.  Asaka is fascinated with tornadoes lately and aptly so – he’s a regular twister all by himself.  As I write this he is laughing and twirling around behind me!  The boy needs to be out, so out we’ll go in the morning, into the winter, bundled up, anything but still, but getting clearer all the time.

And little Kiyoko Amina, 2 months on Epiphany Sunday, is full of giggles and noise, already trying to keep up with brother.