Midwinter

MIDWINTER

A little bit
Of the receding sun
Now gilds the hills
Across the lake from me.
Midwinter's day
Draws to its early close,
Dusk paints the world
In silver-grey.
Against the frozen blue
The golden light of lamps
Begins to shine from living rooms,
The warmth of family meals
Scenting the air.
The cat
Purrs on the couch.

26. 12. 2013

Winter Light

I was going to write a deep, thought-provoking post today, but then I thought, Naaah, it's Christmas time. It's supposed to be about being jolly, and holly, and other things ending in -olly. (That's a shameless quote from Terry Pratchett's Hogfather. Thank you, Sir Terry.) So I decided to think about Christmassy things instead.

Early this morning, I dreamt that I had had to move to Australia quite suddenly. And as we were carrying things into our house there, I felt really disoriented, because I had no idea where anything was in that town, or how things are done Down Under - I woke up still thinking I should google the place, so I could at least see on a map of Australia where I was and then perhaps find the nearest grocery store. Anyway, the point of my telling you this: I got to thinking: I don't know that I would like being Down Under for Christmas. It would seem really weird - kind of wrong - to have Christmas in the middle of summer. Christmas needs darkness, and cold, and winter, at least for this Northerner it does.

Part of the fun and atmosphere of the Christmas celebration is the lights, and they need darkness to set them off. This year we put up perhaps the charlie-browniest of Charlie-Brown-trees ever (Love it. It came from the woods behind our house.). And for all its sad, thin branches, once the lights were on, it was transformed. It's beautiful. The light shines in the darkness - that's what Christmas is all about, isn't it?

And then there's winter sunlight. It has a completely different quality about it than sunlight at the other times of the year. Some years ago, I was looking at an art book, in which the author was demonstrating how to turn a summer photo of a wooded landscape into a snow scene. But the problem was that what she was doing didn't work. The author lived somewhere south, might have been Southern California, and by her own admission had never really seen a snowy landscape. The snow was painted well enough, with blue shadows and all, but the angle of the light was all wrong. She just kept the shadows cast by the sun in her southern-latitudes photo, but a sun that high would never produce snowy weather; her summer-sun snow painting felt really bizarre to me. A winter scene in the Northern latitudes is determined more by the angle of the light than by the snow lying on the ground. See? Those trees are most emphatically winter trees, sitting on my kitchen counter with the winter noon sun shining on them through my south-facing window.

I love winter light, the low, slanted noon sunlight falling through my window, and the sparkling, twinkling, warm light of candles and Christmas trees at night. And soon, very soon, the light will turn, and all will gradually become brighter again. The sun will rise in the morning when I need to get up, and then long before I need to get up (and I will grumble at it then), and the darkness will be, yet again, banished to its short night time. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness shall not prevail.

Incidentally, none of this means that if any of you Kiwis or Ozzies wanted to invite me for Christmas (and pay the airfare), I'd turn down the invitation. I might not want to move Down Under, but I'd love to come for a visit!

Life, the Universe, and Light in the Darkness. Winter will pass soon enough.

Seasons

It's cold enough today that the lake was steaming. If you take a close look at the picture, you can see some faint white smudges over the surface of the water. (I did have a sightly better picture, but then Steve insisted he had to be in the photo, because he hasn't been in a blog post in a while. So what could I do?) Now, the thing is, you see that white rim on the left edge of the water? That's not the shore - that's ice. In other words, we've got near-frozen water, and the temperature differential with the air is great enough that the water turns to steam. Up here, on the North end of the lake, the steam is quite faint, not very noticeable, but at the South end, by the tree where the eagles like to sit, the steam was rising in great swathes of thick mist. Just like your pot of spaghetti water when it's about to come to the boil.

So, it's -20°C out there today (I'd tell you what that is in Fahrenheit, but I don't know - it's 20 Below Freezing, you figure it out), and there's snow. And oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth one hears! You'd think this was unusual for this time of year around here. Well, it's not. This is what the weather is supposed to do in January. But this year, we've had a really warm, snow-free winter so far, since that first snowfall and cold snap in November. No White Christmas. I guess this week Winter finally remembered its job, and decided to make up for lost time.

And so this made me think of seasons, and seasonality. I actually didn't like that warm, green Christmas we were having. Rain in December just didn't seem right. Now, of course this bitter, biting, brutal cold, and the white stuff that goes with it, is inconvenient. For example, Moaning Myrtle (my van, which developed a moaning whine recently when she's cold, hence the moniker) has to park at the top of our steep driveway; if I'd bring her down to the bottom and put her in the garage I likely wouldn't be able to get out again, in spite of assiduous snow shovelling. Also, as I should have known would happen, the cold water tap in the kitchen is frozen again; one night of -15°, and we're getting our cold from the bathroom sink. But, really, it's no big deal. It's winter.

And there's nothing we can do about it, about it being winter, I mean. Or the frozen kitchen tap. We just prepare for it (or not, as the case may be), dress warm, park Myrtle at the top - and wait for the seasons to change again. Six months from now the conversations on the street or in the grocery store will be along the lines of "Sheesh, it's a scorcher today!", and I'll be trying to keep my eyeballs from sweating when I drive down the road instead of preventing my finger tips from freezing off.

I don't like the inconveniences that come with the changing seasons - but I love how every season has its joys and pleasures. A hot bowl of beef stew is never so delicious as when it's cold, dark, and snowy outside, the cooking food steaming up the kitchen windows. But it would be depressing if that's all there ever was; if I didn't know that in a few months, the greatest pleasure will be an icy-cool glass of lemonade and a big plate full of fresh, crisp, colourful salad with balsamic vinaigrette to go with a piece of chicken, barbecued on the balcony to the accompanying roar and whine of the speedboats on the lake. (Okay, forget the speed boats. They're NOT one of the pleasures of summer. In fact, they're... Oh, never mind. More pleasant things to contemplate here.)

Oh, and I don't know what Steve and Horatio have been plotting on my bedside table in the last few days. I think it probably has something to do with chocolate chip cookies.

Life, the Universe, and Steaming Lakes. There is a time for every purpose under heaven.