Weathering

Winter has settled in. Yesterday we woke to a crunch of icy snow on the ground, and the fields on the way to school were white stretching down to the sea. It made me miss my cozy home in the Cascade mountains, stacks of logs and cocoa and the luxury of morning fires. Snow is a beautifully tangible reminder to tuck ourselves inside, pile on the blankets and burrow in. I promptly made a big pot of soup and took a nap.

Truth be told, though, I don’t need any reminders to hibernate… Covid has made that happen regardless of the seasons. One silver lining is my awareness of it. I’m now attuned to my inner barometer: when I want to be in, when I wish to be out, and everything in between. We’re all sitting by our windows these days, finally still enough to see the earth changing in all her minute adaptations. I’ve loved seeing the trees beyond my desk deepen their color and flutter their leaves, watching squirrels scurry to their pantries, noticing which birds favor which branches. Being kept at home by this pandemic has made the smallest of worlds much larger.

I’m fascinated by the weather here, as it’s endlessly changing. There’s no such thing as a forecast- it changes by the minute. These two photos were taken within 30 seconds of each other, from the front and the back of the house… two days in one.

Every day is unique in its particular mix of sun, cloud, wind, and wet. The weather is like a character in the story of my day- engaging in conversation, shaping the plot, adding drama, behaving unpredictably.

I love the rare wild days best, with blowing fierce winds or stinging rain, snapping us out of our grey lulls. Last night there was a violent thunderstorm unlike any I’ve heard before- the claps were so angry and menacing that I shivered in my bed imagining what it would have been like in the Blitz. I found out this morning that it was a phenomenon called thundersnow, when thunderstorms form in snowy conditions. I found it terribly exciting 😊 Dramatic weather startles me into remembering the strength of the world and my smallness in it, and makes me deeply grateful for warmth and comfort.

The darkness has the same effect. This far north, in these shortest days of the year, the sun emerges at 8:30 and disappears at 3:30, with an hour of gloaming on either side. Isn’t gloaming the most marvelous word? At 2 pm the light starts to weaken and the sun sinks behind the roofs opposite, and the day feels like it’s sliding away before I’ve had a chance to do much of anything. I become desperate to hold on to it, with a scramble to buy milk or mail a letter or cut some herbs before the day turns its corner. It might be chilly, or gusting, but it is light, and that is all that matters in the brief window before dusk. By 4 pm we are all burrowed in our cozily lit dens, and the high street is quiet with retreat.

I’m reading Katherine May’s beautiful memoir Wintering, eerily apropos in these trying times. She points out that we have erased our awareness of the changing winter light through our constant use of artificial light, to the point where we may not even notice the nadir and then the turning, the shortening of nights. In the winters of my old life I would sometimes glance surprised out my darkening office window and observe the time, or notice when I began coming and going to work in the dark- but that was about it. Now I am intimate with each particular shade of twilight (some of which have magical Scottish names, like dimmet). Now each fleeting hour of sunlight feels like a gift, not to be wasted. And now I celebrate the long evenings for cooking, books, drawing in together as a family. Weather or winter, tuning in feels like a connection with the world that I’d been unknowingly missing.