On Wintering

By Alexandre Dulaunoy from Les Bulles, Chiny, Belgium - "I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently?", CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=109170343

I am walking.

The cold is fiercer than I’m used to, and I’ve wrapped a blue pashmina, a relic of my twenties, around my hair to keep the sting of shifting snowflakes off my face and ears. I’ve plunged my naked fists as deep as I can into the corners of my coat pockets.

I ought to be inside, but the news, so bleak and cheerless, has driven me out of doors. I don’t know what else to do with myself. So I walk.

Birds huddle in the low holly thickets; squirrels are not leaving their holes. Even the trees that grow thick around the lane hunker down, bare-limbed and grey.

But still, on closer examination, every twig on every branch holds its bud of furled leaves in readiness, like a candle wick waiting for the blaze of a spring dawn.

I wonder how the trees know. On the short, dark days when the sun brings no comfort, they do not only endure. Instead they keep themselves on tiptoe, their great green breath abated, hoping with a hope that will not disappoint.

This is the wisdom of the woods: Winter cannot last.